Paul, an Initiate, the Real Founder of Christianity

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Buddhas and Initiates Series · 8 pages

From Blavatsky Collected Writings XIV, under the heading St Paul, the Real Founder of Present Christianity, with a frontispiece of Paul of Tarsus by Rubens. She opens by endorsing at length a passage from the author of Phallicism: that mysticism is the life and soul of religion; that the Bible is misread and misrepresented when rejected as advancing fabulous and contradictory things; that Moses spoke to the children of men in the only way children in their nonage can be addressed; and that what is derided as superstition is the only true and scientific knowledge, while much of modern science is superstition of a destructive kind.

Her one reservation is registered in a footnote — she cannot agree that rites, ritual, formal worship and prayers are of the absolute necessity of things. The claim the file exists to make follows: that however much the historical figure of Jesus may be true, the New Testament, the Acts and the Epistles are all symbolical and allegorical, and that it was not Jesus but Paul who was the real founder of Christianity — though not, she adds, of official church Christianity. The supporting point is from Acts, that the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch, and were not so called before nor for a long time after, but simply Nazarenes. The companion file Peter, not an Initiate, was the enemy of Paul takes up the other side of the story.

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