Leo Volont
Registered Senior Member
Paul the Paraclete
During a campaign against Paul that has gone on for years now, I have ever been a bit nervous that some well read and studious Protestant would shut me down with a quote from Gospel that would quite vindicate Paul. But it seems for all the talk Protestants do concerning the glories of the Bible, few of them actually read it, or care to consider what the different passages might actually mean. Well, I am through worrying and will simply come out with what the Protestants should have it me with long ago – it is that in John Chapter 16 we are given a description of the Paraclete, that is the Holy Spirit and ‘Comforter’, that was written obviously to refer to Paul.
John Chapter 16 “ … it is for your own good that I am going because unless I go, the Paraclete will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you. And when he comes he will show… I still have many things to say to you but they would be too much for you to bear now. However, when the Spirit of truth comes he will lead you to the complete truth, since he will not be speaking of his own accord, but will say only what he has been told; and he will reveal to you the things to come. He will glorify me, since all he reveals to you will be taken from what is mine…”
Here, The Greek Church of the early 2nd Century, using the platonic language of Greek Logos Philosophy, is telling us that Christ spoke only a basic and preliminary Message and found it his duty to be murdered so that Paul could sooner come along and give us The Truth in all of the fullest of detail. You see, many people of the Church, like I myself, were probably wondering aloud why Paul’s Doctrines were being set above those of Christ, and so this passage on the Paraclete, which, by the way, was not represented in any of the other Gospels, was slipped into the Record in order to effectively Deify Paul – claiming for Paul not only a veritable equality with Christ but putting words in Christ’s own mouth that were claiming that Paul’s message would be superior to His own.
So why is it that Protestants do not resort to this obvious defense of Paul? I suppose it is because of their personal ambitions? You see, I suspect that Protestants are tempted to believe that each and every Protestant is to be individually possessed by the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit – they deny the passage as an after-the-fact prophecy for Paul because they would rather entertain the notion of their own greatness – that it was not something belonging to Paul, but something of their own.
But, if a Protestant were to ever assert that the Gospel Truth is that Christ prophesized the Coming of Paul as the Fulfillment of the Complete Truth, then how would I reply? Well, I would have to point out that the Gospel of John had been written at least fifty years after Paul had come, taught, and had already died. The Gospel of John was nothing more than an expression of the Consensus of Doctrine that had been arrived at in the first years of the 2nd Century of the Christian Era. Some Doctrines were right, and some were wrong. It would be optimistic to suppose that God made the choices, but in fact much was decided by Rome’s destroying Jerusalem and scattering the Messianic Church, leaving the Gentile Congregations of Greece with a disproportionate Vote in the Church Councils. History from the period tells us that often issues were decided by violence, threats of imprisonment and incarceration and even large scale military actions between the gangs and militias of opposing Bishops. Doctrine therefore was often decided in favor of the least moral, least righteous, and the most ruthless and sinister of contingents. So it should not surprise us that Paul’s Doctrines had won out in many instances.
But remember, Paul had been dead already for 50 years. In the grave he could no longer insist against all other influences but his own, and so we find other elements in the Gospel of John which indicate a Church that was still struggling to glimpse the Light from amidst all the Darkness. For instance, we have the most thorough presentation of the Blessedness of the Holy Sacrament in the Gospel of John. This contradicts the efforts of Paul, in First Corinthians Chapter 11, to dissuade Christians from the Holy Sacrament, claiming that it would turn to poison in the mouths of the Unworthy… remembering that Paul never stopped insisting upon each human beings intrinsic ‘unworthiness’.
We also have, in the Gospel of John, the beginnings of the Cult of the Blessed Virgin, which Paul had never once ever encouraged. Consult John Chapter 19:
“…Seeing His Mother and the disciple whom He loved standing near Her, Jesus said to His Mother, ‘Woman, this is your son.’ Then to the disciple he said, ‘This is your Mother’. And from that hour the disciple took Her into his home.
Now, “the disciple Jesus loved” was a literary device meant to indicate the being and behavior of what an Exemplary Disciple would be. By having Christ bequeath to these Exemplary Disciples His very own Mother, and entrusting these Exemplary Disciples to His Mother, we see the beginnings of a Catholic Church that would be actively and decidedly Marian – a Church belonging to the Mother of Christ because Christ had personally authorized such a Dispensation.
So we have it that in the one Gospel of John we discern a struggle between two factions: one of Paul and one of Mary. Who should win in this struggle? Well, we have had countless instances of Apparitions of the Blessed Virgin, while Paul has stayed dead in his grave. I would therefore prefer the Living and Continuing Revelation of Mary. We would be better off forgetting the opportunistic and seductively amoral and permissive lawless Doctrines of Paul.
During a campaign against Paul that has gone on for years now, I have ever been a bit nervous that some well read and studious Protestant would shut me down with a quote from Gospel that would quite vindicate Paul. But it seems for all the talk Protestants do concerning the glories of the Bible, few of them actually read it, or care to consider what the different passages might actually mean. Well, I am through worrying and will simply come out with what the Protestants should have it me with long ago – it is that in John Chapter 16 we are given a description of the Paraclete, that is the Holy Spirit and ‘Comforter’, that was written obviously to refer to Paul.
John Chapter 16 “ … it is for your own good that I am going because unless I go, the Paraclete will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you. And when he comes he will show… I still have many things to say to you but they would be too much for you to bear now. However, when the Spirit of truth comes he will lead you to the complete truth, since he will not be speaking of his own accord, but will say only what he has been told; and he will reveal to you the things to come. He will glorify me, since all he reveals to you will be taken from what is mine…”
Here, The Greek Church of the early 2nd Century, using the platonic language of Greek Logos Philosophy, is telling us that Christ spoke only a basic and preliminary Message and found it his duty to be murdered so that Paul could sooner come along and give us The Truth in all of the fullest of detail. You see, many people of the Church, like I myself, were probably wondering aloud why Paul’s Doctrines were being set above those of Christ, and so this passage on the Paraclete, which, by the way, was not represented in any of the other Gospels, was slipped into the Record in order to effectively Deify Paul – claiming for Paul not only a veritable equality with Christ but putting words in Christ’s own mouth that were claiming that Paul’s message would be superior to His own.
So why is it that Protestants do not resort to this obvious defense of Paul? I suppose it is because of their personal ambitions? You see, I suspect that Protestants are tempted to believe that each and every Protestant is to be individually possessed by the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit – they deny the passage as an after-the-fact prophecy for Paul because they would rather entertain the notion of their own greatness – that it was not something belonging to Paul, but something of their own.
But, if a Protestant were to ever assert that the Gospel Truth is that Christ prophesized the Coming of Paul as the Fulfillment of the Complete Truth, then how would I reply? Well, I would have to point out that the Gospel of John had been written at least fifty years after Paul had come, taught, and had already died. The Gospel of John was nothing more than an expression of the Consensus of Doctrine that had been arrived at in the first years of the 2nd Century of the Christian Era. Some Doctrines were right, and some were wrong. It would be optimistic to suppose that God made the choices, but in fact much was decided by Rome’s destroying Jerusalem and scattering the Messianic Church, leaving the Gentile Congregations of Greece with a disproportionate Vote in the Church Councils. History from the period tells us that often issues were decided by violence, threats of imprisonment and incarceration and even large scale military actions between the gangs and militias of opposing Bishops. Doctrine therefore was often decided in favor of the least moral, least righteous, and the most ruthless and sinister of contingents. So it should not surprise us that Paul’s Doctrines had won out in many instances.
But remember, Paul had been dead already for 50 years. In the grave he could no longer insist against all other influences but his own, and so we find other elements in the Gospel of John which indicate a Church that was still struggling to glimpse the Light from amidst all the Darkness. For instance, we have the most thorough presentation of the Blessedness of the Holy Sacrament in the Gospel of John. This contradicts the efforts of Paul, in First Corinthians Chapter 11, to dissuade Christians from the Holy Sacrament, claiming that it would turn to poison in the mouths of the Unworthy… remembering that Paul never stopped insisting upon each human beings intrinsic ‘unworthiness’.
We also have, in the Gospel of John, the beginnings of the Cult of the Blessed Virgin, which Paul had never once ever encouraged. Consult John Chapter 19:
“…Seeing His Mother and the disciple whom He loved standing near Her, Jesus said to His Mother, ‘Woman, this is your son.’ Then to the disciple he said, ‘This is your Mother’. And from that hour the disciple took Her into his home.
Now, “the disciple Jesus loved” was a literary device meant to indicate the being and behavior of what an Exemplary Disciple would be. By having Christ bequeath to these Exemplary Disciples His very own Mother, and entrusting these Exemplary Disciples to His Mother, we see the beginnings of a Catholic Church that would be actively and decidedly Marian – a Church belonging to the Mother of Christ because Christ had personally authorized such a Dispensation.
So we have it that in the one Gospel of John we discern a struggle between two factions: one of Paul and one of Mary. Who should win in this struggle? Well, we have had countless instances of Apparitions of the Blessed Virgin, while Paul has stayed dead in his grave. I would therefore prefer the Living and Continuing Revelation of Mary. We would be better off forgetting the opportunistic and seductively amoral and permissive lawless Doctrines of Paul.