5 points
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.
