The Excommunication of Paul

At the end of 1992, a book was published titled, “The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered” by Robert Eisenman and Michael Wise (Element books). This book offers probably half a hundred passages from these historic documents, placed in the Qumran caves some two millennias ago and not discovered until between the years 1947 to 1952. In 1952, a team of biblical scholars was appointed to piece together and decipher this wealth of ancient text. But, instead of distributing the findings to the world, they withheld it, publishing only the bare-bones of the ancient textual material. In late 1991, this monopoly was broken by the Huntington’s Library in California. The library announced that it would release photographs of the scrolls, which it had secured from authorities at the time of the 1967 six day war. They had argued that, at such an unstable time, the scrolls could be in danger of destruction and that photographic copies should be held in America for safe-keeping. The series of scholars, Catholics and Jewish, who previously had held exclusive control over the scrolls, long maintained that there was nothing of interest in the unreleased materials. They said that no light would be shed on the early days of Christianity. They were mistaken!

A convocation (an assembly of people gathered for a special purpose) was called, but not to celebrate anything holy, but to curse It appears to be the excommunication of Paul from the Christian Community. The document was prepared for a convocation of the followers of Christ at the time of the Pentecost, “to curse those who depart to the right (or to the left) of the Torah,” that is, the law of Moses.

The scroll fragments praise God. “You are all, everything is in your hand and (You are) the maker of everything, who established the peoples according to their families and their national languages.”

They praise God and speak of the maryadas, or “boundary markers laid down for us.” Those who over-step these boundaries are those whose “soul has rejected the Foundations of Righteousness.”

Paul was such a man. Elsewhere, he is described as “the Lying adversary,” and the “Lying Spouter” who “rejects the law in the midst of the whole congregation”, “the Tongue” and the “Scoffer/Comedian” who “poured over Israel the waters of lying.”

The authors of the book believe that “the priest commanding the Many” who delivers this excommunication judgement was James, the apostle often referred to as James the Just, the bishop of Jerusalem and the brother of Jesus.

The following two excerpts from an earlier book, “The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception” also raise doubts as to the legitimacy of Paul’s role within the early church: by Michael Bajgent and Richard Leigh

“… Paul is in effect the first Christian heretic, and his teachings, which become the foundation of later Christianity, are a flagrant deviation from the ‘Original’ or ‘pure’ form extolled by the leadership. Whether James, the ‘Lord’s brother,’ was literally Jesus’ blood kin or not (and everything suggests he was), it is clear that he knew Jesus…personally. So did most of the other members of the community or ‘early Church,’ in Jerusalem, including, of course, Peter. When they spoke, they did so with first-hand authority. Paul had never had such a personal acquaintance with the figure he’d begun to regard as his ‘Saviour.’ He had only his quasi-mystical experience in the desert and the sound of a disembodied voice. For him to arrogate authority to himself on this basis is, to say the least, presumptuous. It also leads him to distort Jesus’ teachings beyond recognition, to formulate, in fact, his own highly individual and idiosyncratic theology, and then to legitimize it by spuriously ascribing it to Jesus.”

“As things transpired, however, the mainstream of the new movement gradually coalesced, during the next three centuries, around Paul and his teachings. Thus, to the undoubted posthumous horror of James and his associates, an entirely new religion was indeed born, a religion that came to have less and less to do with its supposed founder.”

https://exodus2thekingdom.wordpress.com/2013/07/02/the-excommunication-of-paul/

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Cofion