One more illustration that Paul was outside the ring of conspirators who were
the founders, as forgers, of Historic Christianity in Rome, and I shall have
done.
The Christ proclaimed by Peter and James was the mythical Messiah of the Time-cycles,
the ever-coming one, converted into an historical character; hence
he who was supposed to have just come still remained the Coming One. He himself
is made to say that he is coming before the then present generation shall have
passed away.
Apart from the
mythos and its meaning, there was no other coming, or end of the Times, of
the age, Æon, or world! The Kronian allegory
can only apply to the Kronian Christ, as the metaphorical manifestor of the
Eternal in the sphere of time, who could neither be made flesh nor assume
historic personality. This was known to Paul as an Adept. Such things were an Allegory;
but it was not known to those who preached that "other gospel." James
asserts that "the coming of the Lord is at hand." John declares that
it is the Last Hour. In the Second Epistle of Peter we find the writer mentions
Paul by name, and replies to his Epistles. He is covertly trying to counteract
the influence of Paul's teaching on a matter of such importance as the second
coming of Christ, and the immediate ending of the world. In the first chapter
he proclaims that the end of all things is at hand. Here he says that
mockers are asking, "Where is the promise of his coming?" They forget
the cataclysms and deluges by which the previous heavens and earth have perished.
This time the end will come with a universal conflagration, and, according
to promise, "We look for new heavens and a new earth." . . . "Our beloved
brother, Paul, has been speaking of these things. . . . According to the wisdom
given to him he wrote unto you; as also in his Epistles, speaking in them in
these things; wherein are some things hard to understand, which the ignorant
and unsteadfast wrest (as also the other scriptures) unto their own destruction." The
subject-matter here is the nature of the time-cycles, and the mythical destruction
by flood and fire, which Paul as an Adept knew to be typical and allegorical.
Peter mistakes them for literal realities. Being an outsider, he did not understand
the Wisdom or Gnosis of Paul, but says it is misleading, inasmuch as the ignorant
wrest it unto their own destruction. Peter had also said the day of the Lord
will come as a thief. To this we have direct replies from Paul. "Concerning
the times and the seasons, brethren, ye have no need that aught be written
unto you. For yourselves know perfectly well that the day of the Lord so cometh
as a thief in the night. But ye, brethren, are not in darkness, that that day
should overtake you as a thief; for ye are all sons of light and sons of the
day; we are not of the night nor of the darkness" --as were those
foolish Physicalists, the Petrine A-Gnostics. And again he says to the Thessalonians-- "Now
we beseech you, brethren, touching the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and
our gathering together unto him, that ye be not quickly shaken from your mind,
nor yet be troubled either by spirit, or by word, or by epistle as from us!
as that day of the Lord is present at hand. Let no man beguile you in any wise;" give
no heed to that ignoramus' gobemoucherie! Then follows a break in
the sense. But a falling away is to come first, and the Man of Sin must
be revealed or exposed; the son of perdition, "he that opposeth and exalteth
himself against all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he sitteth
in the Temple of God setting himself forth as God." That, I say, is St.
Paul's opposer, Peter, who was set up in the Church of Rome. "Remember
ye not that when I was with you I told you these things. And now ye know that
which restraineth to the end that he may be revealed in his own season. For
the mystery of lawlessness doth already work only until he that restraineth
now shall be taken out of the way. And then shall be revealed the Lawless one
whom the Lord Jesus shall slay with the breath of his mouth, and bring to nought
by the manifestation of his coming, (him) whose 'coming' is according
to the working of Satan, with all power and signs and lying wonders, and with
all deceit of unrighteousness for them that are perishing, because they received
not the love of truth that they might be saved; and for this cause God sendeth
them a working of error that they should believe a lie." In both quotations
the subject-matter identifies Peter as palpably as if Paul had named him. He
is replying to the teaching of one particular man who is proclaiming the "Coming" of
the Christ and the day of the Lord, or end of the world, as being close at
hand. He says in effect--Do not be troubled or beguiled by any such ignorant
trash. The Lord will not come in his sense, and cannot come in mine, except
that man of sin be revealed. No one has ever dared to dream that this "Man
of Sin" is Peter himself! But the person aimed at is considered capable of
forging epistles in the name of Paul; thus attributing this kind of teaching
to him, and making him father it whilst Paul was yet living. This "man of sin" and "son
of perdition" has set himself up in the temple of God, setting himself
forth as God. This is no emperor Nero, but a portrait of Peter, the life-long
enemy of Paul; he whose preaching is concerning signs and lying wonders, such
as the stories about the end of the world, the passing away of the heavens
with a great noise, the dissolution of the elements with fervent heat, and
the burning up of the earth with all the works therein, and other teachings
of this cataclysmalist, which Paul denounces as delusive, and knows to be a
lie! This misleader of men is restrained for the time being by Paul himself,
but when he departs Peter will reveal himself or be revealed in his true colors,
and the Thessalonians will then see what Paul has known all along, and against
which he had warned them once before, i.e., against that working
of error and belief in a lie, which we now know by name as Historic Christianity.
It is here, then, that we can peer right down into the deep, dark gulf that
divided Peter from Paul, of which we get such a lightning glimpse in the Clementine
Homilies. These writings were inspired by the faction of Peter. By them Paul
is designated the "Hostile Man"; his own epithet, Anomas, the
Lawless, is there flung back at him by Peter, who denounces the puerile preaching
of the man that is his enemy, and who says: "Thou hast opposed thyself
as an Adversary against me, the firm rock, the foundation of the Church." Paul's
conversion, by means of abnormal vision, is attributed to the false Christ,
the Gnostic and Spiritualist opposed to an Historic Christ. In Homily 17, Peter
is obviously hitting at Paul and his visions when he asks: "Can anyone
be instituted to the office of a teacher through visions?" Paul is treated
as the arch-enemy of the Christ crucified--he is the very Anti-Christ. He will
be the author of some great heresy which is expected to break out in the future.
Peter is said to have declared that Christ instructed the disciples not to
publish the only true and genuine gospel for the present, because the false
teacher must arise, who would publicly proclaim the false gospel of the Anti-Christ
that was the Christ of the Gnostics. "As the true Prophet has told us,
the false gospel must come from a certain misleader;" and so they were
to go on secretly promulgating the true gospel, until this false preacher had
passed away. This true gospel was confessedly "held in reserve, to be secretly
transmitted for the rectification of future heresies." They knew well
enough what had to come out, if Paul's preaching, proclaimed in his original
Epistles, got vent more and more. It was Paul whom they had reason to fear.
Hence those who were the followers of Peter and James anathematized him as
the great apostate, and rejected his Epistles. Justin Martyr never once mentions
this founder of Christianity, never once refers to the writings of Paul. Strangest
thing of all is it that the book of the Acts, which is mainly the history of
Paul, should contain no account of his martyrdom or death in Rome! The gulf,
however, cannot be completely fathomed, except on the grounds that there was
no personal Christ, and that Paul was the natural opponent of the men who were
setting up the Christ made flesh for the salvation of the world that never
was lost. My conclusion is, that fabricated evidence is the sole support of
Historic Christianity which can be derived from the Epistles of Paul; that
the manipulation for an ulterior purpose, which is so obvious in the book of
Acts, was far more subtly and fundamentally applied to his Epistles and doctrines;
that they have been worked over as thieves manipulate stolen linen when they
pick out the marks of ownership to escape from detection; that false doctrines
have been foisted into the original text, which seems to have been withheld
for a century after the writer's death, until the leaven of falsehood had done
its fatal work. The problem of the plotters and forgers in Rome was how to
convert the mythical Christology into historic Christianity, and when Paul's
Epistles were permitted to emerge from obscurity in a collection, what had
occurred was the restoration of the carnalised Christ, that "other
Jesus" who was repudiated by Paul in his own lifetime. Paul felt or feared,
and foretold that this would be the case when once he was removed out of the
way. He saw the mystery of lawlessness already at work--the falsifiers sending
forth letters as if from himself--and we have seen what Paul foresaw! the problem
of the plotters who forged the foundations of the Church in Rome was how to
successfully blend the Christ Jesus of the Gnostics, of the pre-Christian Apocrypha,
of Philo, and of Paul, with that Corporeal Christ and impossible personality,
in whom they ignorantly believed, through a blind literalization of mythology,
so as to make the historic look like the true starting-point, and the Gnostic
interpretation becomes a later heresy. This was finally effected when the declaration
of John--that "the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us" --had been
accepted as the genuine Gospel, and that which had been an impossibility for
the Gnostics was an accomplished fact for those who knew no better than to
believe. The Gospel, according to John, was concocted and calculated to serve
as a harmonizing amalgam of doctrines that were fundamentally opposed. In this
Amalgam they tried to mix the "gall and honey," so that, if "well shaken before
taken," it might be swallowed by the followers on both sides. But there was
a great gulf forever fixed between the Gnostic Christology and Historic Christianity.
It was a gulf that never could be soundly bridged, and never has been plumbed,
or bottomed, or filled in. The bodies of two million martyrs of free-thought,
put to death as heretics, in Europe alone, and all the blood that has ever
been shed in Christian wars, have failed to fill that gulf, which waits as
ever wide-jawed for its prey. Across that gulf the Christian Church was erected
upon supports on either side. On one side stood those pillars of the Church
which were seen by Paul in Jerusalem. On the other was Paul himself, the pillar
that stood alone. A difference the most radical and profound divided him from
the other apostles, Cephas, John, and James. From the first they were on two
sides of the chasm that could not be closed; and the Prædicatio Petri declares
that Peter and Paul remained unreconciled till death. The great work of the
first centuries was how to bridge the chasm over, or at least how to conceal
it from the eyes of the world in later times. This could only be done by resting
on Paul as a prop and buttress on the one side and Peter on the other, which
had to be done by converting or perverting the Epistles of the Gnostic Paul
into a support for Historic Christianity. In that way the Church was founded.
It was built as a bridge across the gulf, and the Pope of Rome appointed and
aptly designated Pontifex Maximus. It was reared above the chasm lying
darkly lurking like an open grave below, and to-day, as ever, the Christian
world is horribly haunted with the fear that a breath or two of larger intellectual
life, a too audible utterance of free-er thought, a dose of mental dynamite
may bring the edifice of error down in wreck and ruin to fill that gulf at
last, over which it was so perilously founded from the first.
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