from PREFACE TO ANDROCLES AND THE LION: ON THE PROSPECTS OF CHRISTIANITY; George Bernard Shaw 1912
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=4004THE SECRET OF PAUL'S SUCCESS.
Paul must soon have found that his followers had gained peace of
mind and victory over death and sin at the cost of all moral
responsibility; for he did his best to reintroduce it by making
good conduct the test of sincere belief, and insisting that
sincere belief was necessary to salvation. But as his system was
rooted in the plain fact that as what he called sin includes sex
and is therefore an ineradicable part of human nature (why else
should Christ have had to atone for the sin of all future
generations?) it was impossible for him to declare that sin, even
in its wickedest extremity, could forfeit the sinner's salvation
if he repented and believed. And to this day Pauline Christianity
is, and owes its enormous vogue to being, a premium on sin. Its
consequences have had to be held in check by the worldlywise
majority through a violently anti-Christian system of criminal
law and stern morality. But of course the main restraint is human
nature, which has good impulses as well as bad ones, and refrains
from theft and murder and cruelty, even when it is taught that it
can commit them all at the expense of Christ and go happily to
heaven afterwards, simply because it does not always want to
murder or rob or torture.
It is now easy to understand why the Christianity of Jesus failed
completely to establish itself politically and socially, and was
easily suppressed by the police and the Church, whilst Paulinism
overran the whole western civilized world, which was at that time
the Roman Empire, and was adopted by it as its official faith,
the old avenging gods falling helplessly before the new Redeemer.
It still retains, as we may see in Africa, its power of bringing
to simple people a message of hope and consolation that no other
religion offers. But this enchantment is produced by its spurious
association with the personal charm of Jesus, and exists only for
untrained minds. In the hands of a logical Frenchman like Calvin,
pushing it to its utmost conclusions, and devising "institutes"
for hardheaded adult Scots and literal Swiss, it becomes the most
infernal of fatalisms; and the lives of civilized children
are blighted by its logic whilst negro piccaninnies are rejoicing
in its legends.
PAUL'S QUALITIES
Paul, however, did not get his great reputation by mere
imposition and reaction. It is only in comparison with Jesus (to
whom many prefer him) that he appears common and conceited.
Though in The Acts he is only a vulgar revivalist, he comes out
in his own epistles as a genuine poet,--though by flashes only.
He is no more a Christian than Jesus was a Baptist; he is a
disciple of Jesus only as Jesus was a disciple of John. He does
nothing that Jesus would have done, and says nothing that Jesus
would have said, though much, like the famous ode to charity,
that he would have admired. He is more Jewish than the Jews, more
Roman than the Romans, proud both ways, full of startling
confessions and self-revelations that would not surprise us if
they were slipped into the pages of Nietzsche, tormented by an
intellectual conscience that demanded an argued case even at the
cost of sophistry, with all sorts of fine qualities and
occasional illuminations, but always hopelessly in the toils of
Sin, Death, and Logic, which had no power over Jesus. As we have
seen, it was by introducing this bondage and terror of his into
the Christian doctrine that he adapted it to the Church and State
systems which Jesus transcended, and made it practicable by
destroying the specifically Jesuist side of it. He would have
been quite in his place in any modern Protestant State; and he,
not Jesus, is the true head and founder of our Reformed Church,
as Peter is of the Roman Church. The followers of Paul and Peter
made Christendom, whilst the Nazarenes were wiped out.