Was Paul the True Founder of Christianity?

Jesus, writes A.N. Wilson, was a “rustic exorcist” whose “enormous authority as a moral teacher” filled people with “the love of God,” like Francis of Assisi or Mother Teresa. But he had no intention of founding a new religion.

This view of Jesus will be familiar to those who know Wilson’s previous book, “Jesus.”

In his new book, Wilson expands on his notion that the real founder of Christianity was Paul--if Christianity is understood as “belief in the Divine Savior and his resurrection, belief in the Eucharist.

“Who can deny that the existence of the Eucharist, the Mass, the Lord’s Supper has been of stupendous imaginative importance in the history of civilization?” Wilson writes. “The liturgies of East, and West; the cathedrals which were built to enshrine them; the music which was composed for their setting. All this we must say that we owe to Paul.”

Wilson is not a biblical scholar but an accomplished writer of novels and biographies, including books about Tolstoy, Milton, Hilaire Belloc and C. S. Lewis. He is familiar with the scholarship but goes his own way as he takes the reader with him on his inquiry into “The Mind of the Apostle.”

In much of the book, Wilson is persuasive.

His description of the tension between order and anarchy in the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago is vivid.

Into this unsettled world came Jesus, preaching and healing in the hills and fishing towns of Galilee. His family, Wilson writes, did not believe that he was a god, much less God, nor did they believe that he was born of a virgin mother.

It was Paul who created out of his imagination and the religious context of the time the essentials of what later became the Christian religion.

In contrast to the rural Jesus, Paul was an international traveler, a speaker of Greek. He fostered the concept of taking the Gospel, the Good News, to the Gentiles, and he did just that in the Mediterranean world.

In the process, the followers of Jesus soon developed into a separate sect that presently became a separate religion. They also created a virulent anti-Semitism that culminated in what Wilson calls the “calamitous consequences” of our century.

Wilson is deft in his analysis of the origins of various aspects of Paul’s creation, Christianity, which, he says, “will owe as much to Plato as to Moses.”

“If [we are] in Rome,” he writes, “we think of images of conquest: a succession of emperors persecuting the Church, and then a reversal of power in which the Church is triumphant, and the Bishop of Rome becomes the Pontifex Maximus.

“In Athens we think of the strange history of Christian dogma, the sheer oddity of the fact that Plato and Aristotle come to the modern world, historically speaking, filtered through Christian monasticism; that Christianity itself, as a doctrinal entity with all its esoteric formations about the nature of the Deity, and of the soul, and of the self (divine and human) of Christ, and the heavens and the earth, derives largely from the late Platonism.”

All this, Wilson says, was set on foot by Paul, “one of the most influential and controversial figures who ever lived.”

As to controversy: Wilson argues that Paul’s aversion to homosexuality and his misogyny merely reflect the customs of the day, and must be seen in the context that Paul thought the end of the world was near. To me, this is wishful thinking.

More persuasive are Wilson’s affectionate assertions that Paul is “perhaps the greatest poet of personal religion” and “the first romantic poet in history.”

As evidence, Wilson cites Paul’s letter to the Philippians: “I have not yet reached perfection, but I press on hoping to take hold of that for which Christ once took hold of me.”

And: “Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue and if there be any praise, think on these things.”