Why I Hate Paul (And The Religion He Made Up)

And what most liberals completely miss

When I was in seminary school, I made the mistake of taking a class on the theology of Paul.

On the very first day, we all sat around a conference table—this was one of those small, seminar-style classes—and the professor, a world-renowned scholar on Paul, asked each of us why we’d taken the class and what we hoped to get out of it.

I think I shocked everyone when it got to me. “I can’t stand Paul,” I said. “Nobody has done more to corrupt the original message of Jesus of Nazareth than Paul—a guy who never even met Jesus.”

“Well, okay then,” the professor said, and hurriedly moved along to the next student. A guy from the business school sitting next to me—whom I’d learn was a recovering evangelical—turned his head and gave me a small nod that said, yeah, you’re absolutely right.

I think I shocked the room that day by saying the quiet part out loud. The religion we call Christianity is not the religion of Jesus—it is the religion of Paul. In this essay, we'll examine how Paul cobbled together the theological scaffolding that let the ruling class build something Jesus would not have recognized—a religion stripped of its earth-shattering consequences and safe enough to be preached in the halls of empire.

Who Was Paul, Really?

Before we get into what Paul did to Jesus's message, it's worth spending a minute on who Paul actually was, because most Christians walking around today have a picture of Paul that's been filtered through two thousand years of church tradition and a lot of later propaganda.

The historical Paul—the Paul we can actually know something about—is a much stranger and more interesting figure than the sanitized saint who gets preached about on Sunday mornings.

We actually know a good bit more about Paul than any other figure in early Christianity (unlike Peter, John, or James, Jesus’s brother). That’s partly because his writings make up a good chunk of the New Testament. He was a Diaspora Jew, born in Tarsus, raised as a Pharisee, and initially a fierce persecutor of the early Jesus movement. He was a tradesman—probably a tentmaker or leatherworker—and he was proud of the fact that he worked with his hands and didn’t take money from the communities he founded.

Sometime around 32 to 35 CE, just a few years after Jesus was executed by the Romans, Paul had some kind of intense mystical experience that he understood as an encounter with the risen Christ.

Scholars generally agree now that he didn’t think of it as converting to a new religion, by the way. Paul never gave up his Jewish-ness, thought that Jesus was coming back in his lifetime,¹ and that non-Jews needed to be “saved” just as much as Jews. His was a prophetic call, and he spent the next twenty-five years traveling around the eastern Roman Empire founding small communities of mostly Gentile converts.

He was eventually arrested and, according to reliable early Christian tradition, executed in Rome under Nero sometime in the early 60s CE.

That's the Paul we can actually reconstruct. And we reconstruct him almost entirely from his own letters—seven of them, to be exact. Because here's the first thing that should give every thoughtful Christian pause: of the thirteen letters attributed to Paul in the New Testament, scholars are confident only seven were actually written by him. The other six are forgeries.

That means that some person (or some group of people) after Paul's death sat down, wrote letters, and stuck Paul's name on them to give those letters authority they wouldn't otherwise have had.

This matters because the forged letters are where a lot of the worst stuff lives—the instructions for wives to submit to their husbands, for slaves to obey their masters, for women to shut up and not teach. That's not Paul. That's somebody using Paul's name to baptize the status quo. We'll come back to this.

But what about Acts? I can hear you asking. Acts is, to put it gently, not history. Written somewhere between thirty and fifty years after Paul was already dead, it’s a theological narrative with an agenda. That agenda included smoothing over the bitter fights Paul had with the original apostles in Jerusalem, making the early church look like one big happy family, and shifting blame for Christian persecution off the Romans and onto “the Jews.”² When Acts and Paul’s own letters contradict each other—which is often—scholars side with Paul’s letters.

What Paul Did to Jesus

Now. Here’s where it gets interesting, and here’s where I start to lose patience.

In his writings which survive, Paul shows shockingly little interest in what Jesus actually said and did. In his seven authentic letters, you will find almost no teachings, quotations, or actions of Jesus. Paul writes thousands of words about Jesus and manages, somehow, to almost never mention anything Jesus actually taught or did.

What he’s interested in, instead, is a very specific set of claims about Jesus: that Christ died for our sins, that he was buried, that he was raised from the dead, and that faith in this death and resurrection is what makes a person right with God. That’s the gospel according to Paul. And if you’re paying attention, you’ll notice something strange about it: you could believe every single thing Paul says about Jesus and still have no idea what Jesus actually stood for.

The actual Jesus, the historical Jesus, preached something closer to a revolution than a religion. He proclaimed that God's kingdom was imminently arriving—a kingdom where the hungry would be fed, debts would be forgiven, the rich would be made poor, and the powerful would be laid low—and that entry into that kingdom was contingent not on what you believed but on how you lived.³ And the Romans, who had a pretty good nose for political threats, understood exactly what he was doing when they nailed him to a cross.

Paul, however, preached a religion about Jesus—specifically, about the cosmic significance of Jesus’s death and resurrection, and about how believing in that death and resurrection got you right with God. The religion OF Jesus, as the theologian Howard Thurman once put it, became a religion ABOUT Jesus. And the basis for the move from one to the other is almost entirely Paul’s doing.

To Be Fair…

I don’t want to paint Paul as an entirely bad guy. The historical Paul, based on his own letters, was passionate, intense, sometimes kind, often insufferable, and deeply convinced he’d been given a divine mission (which is how people describe me sometimes, minus the divine mission, so I can relate). There is much to admire: he was a radical egalitarian, and genuinely valued and worked with women when to do so was a dangerous act.⁴

And there are plenty of people I disagree with theologically — people I might even consider a nutjob — whom I nonetheless respect. Paul, had I known him, would probably fall into that category. Because the truth is, Paul’s ideas were just one set in a sea of many after Jesus’s death. There were dozens of early groups with wildly different (and often genuinely crazy) ideas about what Jesus’s life, death, and supposed resurrection meant, and Paul’s was only one voice in that chorus.⁵

Paul doesn’t entirely deserve the bad rap he’s gotten. His dumb ideas were just dumb ideas — they had a following, sure, but there was nothing inherent in them that destined them to win. And this is the part that most liberals miss: those ideas only won because the rich and powerful figured out how useful his theology could be, and then weaponized disagreeing with it.

How Paul Became “Paul”

This process started almost immediately. Within a generation of Paul's death, somebody or some group—we don't know who—started writing letters in Paul's name that walked back a lot of the more radical stuff in the authentic letters.

The real Paul had written that "in Christ there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female." The forged Paul wrote household codes instructing wives to submit to husbands and slaves to obey masters.⁶

The real Paul had worked alongside women leaders in his communities and greeted them by name in his letters. The forged Paul wrote that women should be silent in churches and were not permitted to teach or have authority over men.⁷

The real Paul was killed by the Roman Empire. The forged Paul told Christians to submit to the governing authorities because they had been instituted by God.

Same name. Opposite message. And for most of Christian history, almost nobody could tell the difference.

By the second century, Paul had become so central to the Christian imagination that the real battle was over who got to claim him.

A guy named Marcion took Paul’s contrast between law and grace to such an (antisemitic) extreme that he argued there were literally two different Gods—the angry, legalistic God of the Old Testament, and the loving God of Jesus and Paul. Marcion created the first Christian canon, which consisted of exactly one edited gospel and ten of Paul’s letters.

The proto-orthodox church fought back by reclaiming Paul for their side, incorporating the forged Pastoral Epistles into the canon to give them a more conservative, hierarchical Paul to work with, and gradually building the theological structure that would become Catholic Christianity.⁸

Within a couple of centuries, Augustine would go even further. He read a passage from Romans, had a conversion experience, and spent the rest of his life building a theological system that took Paul’s most anxious and tortured passages about sin and flesh and grace and turned them into the doctrine of original sin (the crazy and toxic idea that every human being is born already guilty, already damned, already in need of the church’s sacraments to be saved).⁹

Augustine’s Paul dominated Western Christianity for a thousand years. And notice what Augustine’s Paul was particularly good at: he was very interested in the state of your soul and very uninterested in the state of the empire. He could make you feel terrible about your sexual desires and completely at peace with the oppressive Roman social order.

Then came Martin Luther, who had his own transformative experience reading Romans, and who elevated Paul’s doctrine of justification by grace through faith to the absolute center of Protestant theology.¹⁰

Luther loved Paul so much that he openly said the letters of Paul should be “far, far to be preferred” over three of the four gospels—the gospels, you’ll notice, that contain most of what Jesus actually said and did. Luther’s Paul became the Paul of hundreds of millions of Protestants.

And Luther’s Paul, like Augustine’s Paul before him, was fantastic at getting Christians worked up about their individual standing before God and utterly silent on the question of whether the economic and political order around them bore any resemblance to the Kingdom Jesus had preached.¹¹

By the time we get to modern American Christianity, Paul has been so thoroughly absorbed into the project of defending the existing order that most Christians cannot even see it anymore. Paul is the one you quote to tell women to be quiet. Paul is the one you quote to tell gay people like me we’re going to hell.

Paul—or rather, “Paul,” the cultural construct that two thousand years of ruling-class interpretation has built out of the authentic letters and the forgeries and Augustine and Luther and everyone in between—has become the great all-purpose tool for maintaining the status quo: wealth, power, racism, heteronormativity and patriarchy. Paul built the scaffolding, the ruling class built the prison.

Cultural Hegemony at Work

What the rich and powerful did to Paul is a remarkable and clear-cut example of the most effective way the ruling class keeps us oppressed. There’s a name for this, and it comes from an Italian Marxist named Antonio Gramsci, who spent the last years of his life writing from a fascist prison cell trying to figure out why the working class so rarely revolts even when revolt seems obviously in its interest.

His answer was something he called “cultural hegemony”—the idea that ruling classes don’t actually hold onto power primarily through force. They hold onto power by shaping the culture itself, by shaping what counts as common sense, and by making the existing order feel so natural, inevitable, and even holy that most people can’t imagine anything else. You don’t need soldiers to crush the peasants if you can convince the peasants that their suffering is God’s will and their reward is in heaven.¹²

What Christianity became—what Paul’s scaffolding was used to build—is one of the most successful hegemonic projects in human history. Jesus of Nazareth preached a complete revolution. Not a metaphorical one, not just a spiritual one, but an actual overturning of the economic and political order.

That message was—and still is—a direct threat to empire, wealth, and capitalism—from Roman to U.S. imperialism, from Pontius Pilate to Donald Trump. And the ruling class discovered that the most effective way to neutralize it wasn’t to fight it. It was to co-opt it. Corrupt it. Canonize it. Preach it from pulpits, funded by the same people it was supposed to threaten.

That’s what happened to Jesus. Paul gave them the raw material, mostly by accident, and the powerful did the rest. They took a radical, Palestinian-Jewish working class prophet and turned him into a cosmic sacrifice whose only real demand was that you believe the right things about him and never question the status quo.

The revolution got buried under the theology. The threat got buried under the creed. And the scaffolding Paul built got turned into a prison that two billion people now live inside without ever noticing the walls.

But the prophet from Nazareth—and his radical message—is still down there. It’s our duty, to both Jesus and our fellow human beings to dig him back up—to recover the religion OF Jesus from under two thousand years of the religion ABOUT him.

You don’t have to believe Jesus was God to believe Jesus was right. You don’t have to accept Paul’s theology to take seriously what Jesus actually said about money and power and the people society throws away. The historical Jesus stands on his own without any of the scaffolding—and he’s a lot more dangerous without it.

So no, I still can’t stand Paul; I’d say it louder now than I said it that day in seminary. But the deeper problem was never really Paul. The deeper problem is what the ruling class did with him, and what we’ve been trained not to notice.

The only question left is whether we're going to keep listening to the people who buried him—or whether we're finally going to listen to him.

1. Paul’s most explicit prediction of Jesus’s return in his lifetime is in 1 Thessalonians 4:15–17. A similar expectation is found in 1 Corinthians 15:51–52.

2. Compare, for instance, Paul's own account in Galatians 2 of his bitter, acrimonious fight with Peter and James over whether Gentile converts needed to follow Jewish law. According to him, he calls his opponents "false brothers" and accuses Peter of hypocrisy to his face. To the author of Acts, the Jerusalem Council becomes a harmonious meeting ending in unanimous agreement. Or compare 2 Corinthians 11, where Paul says he fled Damascus in a basket because the Arab governor under King Aretas was trying to arrest him, with Acts 9, which tells the same story but swaps the Arab political threat for a fictional Jewish plot (historically impossible, since Jewish authorities had no control over the gates of Arab Damascus). The pattern is consistent throughout Acts: Roman officials like Pilate, Gallio, and Festus repeatedly declare Jesus and Paul innocent, while "the Jews" are cast as the riotous villains forcing Rome's hand. This is not history—it is antisemitism, used as it is so often used, to redirect anger from actual power towards a powerless and disliked “other.”

3. Scholars of the historical Jesus agree that he taught ethical behavior—specifically active love and compassion toward others—as the central criterion for entering the coming kingdom of God. He summarized the Torah as the dual command to love God and neighbor, and in the parable of the Sheep and the Goats (Matthew 25), people inherit the kingdom not on the basis of belief or ritual observance but because they fed the hungry, clothed the naked, welcomed the stranger, and visited the sick. Jesus also demanded a radical reversal of conventional values: selling one's possessions, giving to the poor, loving one's enemies. As an apocalyptic prophet who believed God was about to intervene in history imminently, Jesus framed these ethical demands as urgent preparation for the kingdom's arrival—and as the means by which his followers would begin implementing its ideals in the present. For more, see Bart Ehrman’s Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020),

4. Paul’s partnerships with women are most visible in Romans 16, where he greets twenty-nine coworkers by name — ten of them women — and describes them in terms he reserves elsewhere for fellow missionaries. Whatever Paul’s later reputation — much of it built on letters he didn’t write, like 1 Timothy — the historical Paul worked shoulder to shoulder with women as leaders, patrons, and fellow apostles.

5. For an in-depth exploration of this, see Bart Ehrman’s Lost Christianities: The Battles of Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

6. Scholars view that verse, Galatians 3:28, as a radical baptismal formula meant to erase the fundamental social hierarchies of ethnicity, class, and gender within the Christian community. Forged letters like Colossians & Ephesians explicitly command, “Wives, be subject to your husbands” (Eph. 5:22) and “Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything” (Eph. 6:2). While these texts still included some mutual obligations for husbands and masters to treat their dependents well, they successfully walked back Paul’s original vision of total equality. By the time the Pastoral Epistles, 1 Timothy & Titus, were forged, the subjugation became absolute, and mutual obligations were erased. For more, see Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan’s The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church’s Conservative Icon (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2009).

7. As noted above, Paul worked closely with women and considered them his equal. The later forged letter of 1 Timothy completely reverses this, explicitly forbidding female leadership to conform to patriarchal norms: “Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent” (1 Tim. 2:11-12). Even the famous command for women to “be silent in the churches” found in 1 Corinthians 14:33b–36 is widely recognized by scholars as a later forgery. Although 1 Corinthians is an authentic letter, scholars conclude that these specific verses were inserted into the manuscript by a later scribe who wanted to silence women, directly contradicting Paul’s own statements earlier in the same letter. For more on this, see John Dominic Crossan’s God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2008).

8. For more, see Ehrman’s Lost Christianities.

9. For a detailed explanation of Augustine’s reading of Paul’s Romans into the doctrine of original sin, see Joseph A. Fitzmyer’s definitive historical-critical commentary on Romans, Romans: A New Translation With Introduction and Commentary (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), also part of the Yale Anchor Bible series.

10. For more on Luther’s corruption of Paul, see Borg and Crossan’s The First Paul.

11. Luther even famously opposed the mass, working-class revolution of his time. The German Peasants’ War of 1524–1525 was the largest popular uprising in Europe before the French Revolution, and the ruling class slaughtered up to 100,000 of the roughly 300,000 poorly armed workers. At the height of the revolt, Luther published Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants (May 1525), urging the princes to “smite, slay, and stab” the workers like rabid dogs — justifying it all by appealing to Romans 13 and the Christian duty to submit to governing authorities.

12. For more on Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony and its application to religion, see Joseph V. Femia, Gramsci’s Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness, and the Revolutionary Process (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).