Was St. Paul a liar?

One of my critics tells me to forget about Paul. But I can’t. When I read chapter 2 of St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians, I feel horrified, mystified and amazed. Horrified, because it describes Paul’s angry fight against the three pillars of our Christian religion (James, the brother of Jesus, and Peter and John); mystified, because Paul wins the fight by somehow proving that James was wrong about his own brother; and amazed, because I now realize our whole Christian religion might be based on the teachings of this one man’s vision.

In this bristling chapter, which Paul tries unsuccessfully to soften, Paul stands up to James (“whose importance means nothing to me” Gal. 2), and to Peter and John, men who lived and worked with Jesus for at least three years, and Paul says, in effect, “I know Jesus better than you do.” Paul, who never met Jesus, tells Jesus’s brother and his closest buddies to forget everything they remember about the man, and believe Paul’s image of him because Paul “had a vision.” “I no longer live, but the Christos lives in me.” (Gal.2:20)

What would you do if you were James; if you had grown up with your brother and had watched him grow and mature and become the leader of his people; what would you do if some stranger who had never even met your brother told you, “I know him better than you do?” I have a feeling I know what James did that day. I suspect it wasn’t at all what Paul told his gullible Greek converts in Galatia. In fact, I doubt very much that James gave Paul “the right hand of fellowship,” as Paul puts it so eloquently. (Gal. 2:9)

What do I think James did? Well, James was a faithful Jew just like his brother, Jesus. Paul, on the other hand, was a transformed Jew, transformed into following an image of the “Christos;” an image created by a vision with a broken connection to the Judaism of Jesus (2:2). James obviously didn’t share the Pauline vision; instead, he remembered the actual words and actions of his Jewish brother, and when Paul said, “We are justified by faith in the Christos, not by the works of the Torah” (Gal.2:16), I think James, a lover of the Torah, might have screamed, “Liar! Liar!”

We know Paul was called a liar many times, and not just by James. Paul was forced to defend himself time after time in his epistles. He starts a paragraph in Romans by saying, “I speak the truth; I am not lying” (Rom. 9:1). In his second letter to the Christians in Corinth, he outlines all the problems he’s had and then adds, “I am not lying” (2 Cor. 11:31). This same theme is repeated in 1 Tim. 2:7 where he says he was “appointed” as an apostle, and then: “I am telling the truth; I am not lying.”

Was Paul a liar? We know Paul needed to repudiate those elements of Judaism which were offensive to his Roman and Greek converts. He needed to say circumcision and the High Holy Days and the Torah were all unnecessary, even though he knew they had been necessary to Jesus. He needed to blame the “Jews” and not the Romans for the death of Jesus; the Romans were his converts. The fact that he wrote an erroneous letter (at least, in the mind of James) that ended up in our Bible doesn’t make him less than human. So, did he tell a lie to back up his claims?

Of course, not. I’m convinced that Paul, the hero of over 2 billion Christians, believed in his vision. And I also think Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, believed in his vision; 15 million Mormons around the world revere Smith as a saint. And there’s no doubt in my mind that each one of those children in Fatima and Lourdes and Mexico City believed it was the Virgin Mary who appeared to them in a vision and gave each one of them instructions for the world.

None of them were liars. They didn’t fabricate a complicated lie to give themselves notoriety. All of them, including Paul, preached the message they believed they had received. They believed every word of it. The question is: Do we?

This story was originally published March 15, 2018 at 4:19 PM with the headline "Was St. Paul a liar?."