The PEDOPHILE president recently posted an image of himself as Jesus. The MAGA RETARDS make many claims about following Jesus, but these individuals are hypocrites, false prophets and manipulators. Jim Palmer provides a useful historical narrative explaining how “christians” corrupted the life and teachings of Jesus for their own selfish social and political purposes. Get to know the REAL Jesus. Focus on the commandments in John 13:34-35: Love one another — selflessly and unconditionally!
Paul the Apostle
What we call Christianity is not a clean extension of the life and teaching of Jesus Christ. The religion bears his name, but most of what has been built under that name doesn’t actually come from him. If you want to understand why, you have to look at Paul the Apostle. Not as a villain, not as a scapegoat, but as the single most influential architect of what Christianity became.
Modern Christianity runs far more on Paul than it does on Jesus. That’s not a controversial statement if you actually read the texts. Paul’s letters were written before the gospels. He was shaping belief, structure, and interpretation before the story of Jesus was even fully written down. By the time the gospel writers put pen to paper, they were already working in a theological atmosphere that Paul had helped create. What we ended up with is a system where the framework comes from Paul, and the figure of Jesus is interpreted through it.
That’s a bit strange. Paul never met Jesus in the way the disciples did. His authority comes from an experience he interpreted as an encounter with the risen Christ. From that point on, he becomes the one answering questions, resolving disputes, defining doctrine. He didn’t appoint himself as the central voice of early Christianity, but that’s exactly where he landed. Communities deferred to him. His letters circulated. Over time, they hardened into authority. And eventually, into something far more dangerous: infallibility.
This is where things start to bend. Because Paul wasn’t working from a neutral position. He was a product of his own formation. A Pharisee. A man steeped in Jewish law, sacrifice, and religious structure. When he tried to make sense of Jesus, he used the materials he had available. That’s what any of us would do. The problem is not that Paul did this. The problem is that we later treated the result as if it came straight from God, untouched by context, psychology, or limitation.
Take atonement. Paul locks in the idea that Jesus’ death functions as a sacrificial payment for sin. Blood, substitution, the lamb of God. This becomes the center of the system. And once that happens, everything reorganizes around the cross. Sin becomes the primary problem. Payment becomes the solution. Salvation becomes a transaction. The execution of Jesus, a brutal act of empire, gets reframed as a divine requirement.
That move changed everything. The earliest followers of Jesus were not walking around building a religion centered on crucifixion imagery. They were trying to live out a way of being shaped by his teaching. The cross, as a dominant symbol, doesn’t even show up in material form until centuries later. But once Pauline theology takes hold, the entire structure shifts. What began as a radical reorientation of life becomes a system of belief about death.
Christianity becomes Cross-tianity.
I don’t think Jesus would recognize much of what’s been built in his name. The man who disrupted religious systems, who consistently pulled people back to lived reality, who refused to reduce life to rule-keeping or metaphysical transactions, gets turned into the centerpiece of a theology that does exactly those things. If Jesus and Paul the Apostle had to sit down and compare notes, it’s not at all clear they’d be aligned.
That doesn’t make Paul the enemy. It makes him human.
He was responding to real questions from real communities trying to figure out what this all meant. He was doing his best to bring coherence to something that was still unfolding. None of this happened in a vacuum. Culture, training, expectation, personal experience, all of it fed into what he produced. If you or I were in that position, we wouldn’t have done any better. We would have done the same thing: reach for the frameworks we had and try to make them work.
The issue is what came next.
We took those letters, those context-bound responses, and elevated them into the final word on reality. We stopped asking where they came from, what shaped them, what limitations they carried. We didn’t “consider the source.” We canonized it. And once that happens, critical thought gets framed as rebellion, and reinterpretation gets framed as betrayal.
That’s on us, not Paul.
You can still find value in what he wrote. There is insight there. There is depth. There are ways of understanding human experience that remain useful. But the moment you treat his writings as direct transmissions from God, you’ve stepped out of reality and into projection. You’ve replaced discernment with submission.
And it shows up in the creeds.
Look at them closely. Whether you’re talking about early church formulations, Catholic doctrine, or Protestant confessions, what you mostly find are theological claims about Jesus, not the teachings of Jesus. His actual words, his way of engaging life, his orientation to reality, are barely present. It’s a system about him, not a continuation of what he was doing.
Somewhere along the way, the man got buried under the meaning.
And then there’s the cultural distortion layered on top of all of it. We turned a brown-skinned, Middle Eastern Jew into a white, Western religious figure and built a theological system around that image. The historical person, the one who walked the roads of Nazareth and disrupted everything he touched, gets lost. Not accidentally. Systematically.
So no, you don’t have to hate Paul the Apostle to see this clearly. He doesn’t need to be torn down. He needs to be understood. Situated. Brought back into context as a human being trying to make sense of something unprecedented. The mistake is not that Paul interpreted Jesus. The mistake is that we stopped questioning the interpretation.
If you actually want to understand Christianity, you have to separate the layers. You have to look at Jesus without automatically filtering him through Paul. You have to examine Paul without assuming he speaks for God. You have to ask what was added, what was emphasized, what was lost.
If you don’t, you’re not engaging a tradition. You’re inheriting a construction without ever realizing it was built.
Jim Palmer, Inner Anarchy
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