THE LORD’S SUPPER ― INSTITUTED BY JESUS OR PAUL?

 

In Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus institutes the Lord’s Supper during the passover meal. Whereas, in John’s gospel the Lord’s Supper is not instituted - Jesus was dead by the time of the Passover meal.

In 1 Corinthians 11:23 the Paul writes, “For I received from the Lord that which I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus in the night in which He was betrayed took bread...” Supposedly Paul wrote these words about twenty years after Jesus’ death, but claims that he got the instructions for the Lord’s Supper directly from Jesus (evidently from one of his many ganja revelations).  THINK people, had a church already been celebrating the Lord’s Supper, Paul certainly would have been aware of it and would have had no need to receive it from the Lord. Some apologists try to play games with the text to make it seem like Paul actually received the instructions from apostles, but one thing Paul stresses is that what he teaches he receives from no man (Galatians 1:11-12).

The Lord’s supper was not invented by Paul, but was borrowed from Mithraism, another mythical religion that existed long before Christianity. Mithraism was also Christianity’s chief competitor up until the 4th century when it was suppressed by Emperor Constantine. In Mithraism, the central figure was the mythical Mithras who died for the sins of mankind and was resurrected. Believers in Mithras were rewarded with eternal life. Part of the Mithraic communion liturgy included the words, “He who will not eat of my body and drink of my blood, so that he will be made one with me and I with him, the same shall not know salvation.”

The early Church Fathers Justin Martyr and Tertullian tried to say that Mithraism copied the Lord’s Supper from Christianity, but then they were forced to say that demons had copied it since only demons could copy an event in advance of its happening! They could not say that the followers of Mithras had copied it  since it was a known fact that Mithraism had included the ritual a many centuries before the fictitious birth of Jesus. The cult of Mithras has been traced to 1400 BC in Persia.

Where did Mithraism come from?  For over three hundred years the rulers of the Roman Empire worshipped the god Mithras. The ancient historian Plutarch mentioned Mithraism in connection with the pirates of Cilicia in Asia Minor encountering the Roman general Pompey in 67 BCE. More recently, in 1989 Mithraic scholar David Ulansey wrote a book, The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries, in which he convincingly shows that Mithraism originated in the city of Tarsus in Cilicia. That this is also the home town of Paul, the inventor of Christianity, cannot be a coincidence.

Paul admits that he did not know Jesus and maintained that his religion was not taught to him by any man (Galatians 1:11-12). All of Paul’s theology is based on his own so called revelations, or ganja visions. Like dreams, visions or hallucinations do not come out of the blue, but reveal what is already in a person’s subconscious. It is very likely that the source of most of Paul’s visions, and therefore most of his theology, is to be found in Mithraism. That the New Testament reports Jesus at the Last Supper saying more or less the same thing Paul said to the Corinthians many years later is another example of the church modifying the gospels to incorporate the theology of Paul, which eventually won out over the theology of Jesus’ original disciples. 

Christianity should properly be called Pauline Christology. 

"And I said to him, 'Jeez, Jeezy boy, I feel like no one will ever accept me.'  And Jesus looked at me and said, 'You know what my theory is ― accept me or go to hell.'" -Gilbert Gottfried (1955-)

 

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