Paul of Tarsus has been accused of having introduced into Christianity a Christ other than the Jesus of the Gospels. In fact, he speaks more of “Christ, immortal King of the ages” than of Jesus, whom he did not know in flesh and bone. He prided himself on being an apostle, not of the “carnal Jesus,” but of the immortal Christ, who appeared to him at the gates of Damascus and radically transformed him.
Some theologians say that Paul transformed the humble Jesus of Galilee into a hero and redeemer of the world in the manner of the supermen of the Greek writers.
Especially in the Epistles to the Colossians, the Ephesians and the Philippians, Paul extols the glories of the cosmic Christ. The latter bears minimal resemblance to the Jesus of the evangelists. “All that exists in heaven and on earth converges in Christ as at the top.” The Christ is “superior to all principalities, powers, virtues and dominations, not only in this world but also in the next – he, who fills the entire Universe with everything”.
These words recall the beginning of the Epistle to the Philippians, in which Paul sings of the cosmic Christ, who was in the glory of God, and did not feel that it should cling to that divine equality, but emptied itself of holy splendour and clothed in human, becoming man, servant, victim, crucified. And for this, God sovereignly exalted him and gave him a name that is above all names, so that, in the name of Christ, all the knees, heavenly, earthly, and infraterrestrial bend, and all confess that he is the Lord.
In these words, Paul describes the passage from the pre-human Christ to a post-human super-Christ, becoming greater after the incarnation than he was before. The Latin Vulgate says that God exalted him, but Paul's original Greek says emphatically that God super exalted him or exalted him sovereignly, making him greater than he was. Dogmatic theologians do not admit an evolution in Christ because they identify Christ with the Divinity itself, in which there is no evolution; but, if Christ is the “firstborn of all creatures”, in Paul's expression, evolution is possible.
To the Colossians, who identified Christ with the superior angels, Paul writes: “It is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creatures because in it were created all things, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible - everything it was created by it and for it. It is prior to the Universe, and in it, the Universe exists. It occupies the primacy in all things, and in it has pleased to reside all the plenitude”. Plenitude for Paul is the Divinity as opposed to emptiness. For Paul, Christ is the first and most perfect individual emanation of the Universal Divinity, prior to any other creature, being the first of all cosmic creatures, the Alpha and Omega, in the words of Teilhard de Chardin, the beginning and the end, in the language of Revelation.
According to John, Christ is the “Only Begotten of the Father”, the only creation of the Divinity, while humans and all other creatures were created by Christ, as the author of the fourth Gospel says: “all things and nothing that was made was made without it.”
The confusion that certain theologians make between God and the Divinity has given rise to secular controversies. According to the sacred books, especially in the vision of John and Paul, Christ is God, but not the Divinity, which he calls “Father”, which is in Christ and in which Christ is, but “the Father is greater than that I". God, in the light of sacred books, is the highest individual emanation of the Universal Divinity, therefore a creature of the Divinity, the “firstborn of all creatures”.
Given this, it is comprehensible that Peter, in one of his epistles, warns the Christians of that time, saying that there are certain difficult passages that the ignorant pervert to their own perdition in the writings of brother Paul. Indeed, for Peter and the other Galilean fishermen, it must have been difficult to have an accurate vision of the cosmic Christ revealed by the ex-rabbi scholar and enlightened Christ seer, for a cosmic intuition is never expressible in terms of intellectual analysis. Both today and then, this same difficulty persists. Even today, some philosophers and theologians regard Paul of Tarsus as a forger of the Gospels, as a smuggler who introduced a Cosmic Christ into Christianity alongside the humble Jesus of Nazareth. However, Paul's Christ is the same Nazarene described by the Evangelists, but viewed from the lofty perspective of the prehistoric Logos, which John the mystic also describes at the beginning of his Gospel: “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God.”
The cosmic Christ, pre-human, and Jesus made cosmic by Christ, post-human - this is the grandiose synthesis of Paul of Tarsus, the Alpha and Omega of his experience and of all his epistles.
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