paul was an agent of rome sent to subvert and coopt jesus’ revolutionary anti-imperialist movement, beginning the process of transforming that message into one compatible with the ideological superstructure of the roman empire, a process that culminated with constantine and the council of nicaea after three centuries of murdering “heretics”
I think this theory is better if he wasn’t specifically sent, but just a guy saying tons of shit to be famous/wealthy/etc. and Rome allowed his words to spread because they were less confrontational. These things were the “systemic” defense of an existing base-superstructure system.
he started off as a pharisee, a member of the comprador regime directly persecuting the early christians before his nominal conversion. so i agree, i’m not saying paul was like a roman equivalent of a cia agent or something. but he was part of the system, as you say.
Pharisees weren’t really compradors. The actual compradors were the Sadducees. They were the ones who maintained the Second Temple and who collaborated with the Roman colonizers.
It doesn’t really work though, since Luke-Acts is very much a defense of Paul (though not without some differences) and is probably the most politicallly radical of the Gospels
I’m not sure what you’re saying here, unfortunately. I’ve read the Bible before but do not know enough about internal referencing to make any defense of my theory honestly. What does Luke defending him have to do with whether he was sent by Rome specifically or not?
I have no reason to doubt or argue any theory here, it just seems like you know something I don’t and I want to learn it.
There’s also the fact that most of Paul’s odder statements, like banning women from leadership, are not by him at all. Only about half his epistles are actually by him or his immediate inner circle.
FWIW, I don’t think Paul was a grifter, I think he was a former grifter who became a sincere convert after some weird shit happened to him, and unfortunately like Evrart in Disco Elysium he was just so slimy it drips off him onto the page.
personally i think the line between grifter and sincere convert is also quite blurry for this kind of thing. if someone’s paycheck depends upon a particular belief, in due time they’ll come to believe it sincerely. and then yeah, there’s paul and there’s the early paulist counterrevolutionary faction.
