to take control of a nascent religion and steer it away from the more radical ideas that some of the other early followers took away from the teachings of Jesus.
tbh authentic Paul was in many ways more radical that Jesus… Jesus told people to give to the poor because the end was near, and so did Paul. Jesus chose all male disciples, Paul refers to Phoebe, Prisca, Euodia and Syntyche (all women) as his “fellow workers” or “ministers”. Jesus affirmed “for this reason a man will leave his parents and be united with his wife”. From Paul we have “there is neither male nor female in Christ Jesus”. Jesus followed synagogue traditions (male only), Paul allowed women to pray and prophesy in his churches. Jesus taught the Jews to follow a loving version of the Torah, Paul pushed the utterly radical idea that Jews were freed from the Torah and united with gentiles in “one body”.
(The conservative line taken in later letters attributed to Paul are believed by academic scholars to be from his later school of disciples, not from him himself.)
There are some aspects of Paul which tick the conservative box in that he comes across as a sex negative asexual who uses part of his soapbox to preach his own distain by insisting that pleasure in sex is bad and linking the idea of anything but purely reproductive sex with a spiritual uncleanliness and immorality. It fuels a lot of bad shit from purity doctrine to anti-same sex relationship rhetoric.
Not that sexual control over women and reproduction particularly hasn’t been a worldwide phenomenon but instilling pleasure and sex directly to sin really linked in to all the conservative bullshit that Paul’s hijacked letters contained so I feel like there’s a bit of a “depends on your definition of conservative” thing.
tbh authentic Paul was in many ways more radical that Jesus… Jesus told people to give to the poor because the end was near, and so did Paul. Jesus chose all male disciples, Paul refers to Phoebe, Prisca, Euodia and Syntyche (all women) as his “fellow workers” or “ministers”. Jesus affirmed “for this reason a man will leave his parents and be united with his wife”. From Paul we have “there is neither male nor female in Christ Jesus”. Jesus followed synagogue traditions (male only), Paul allowed women to pray and prophesy in his churches. Jesus taught the Jews to follow a loving version of the Torah, Paul pushed the utterly radical idea that Jews were freed from the Torah and united with gentiles in “one body”.
(The conservative line taken in later letters attributed to Paul are believed by academic scholars to be from his later school of disciples, not from him himself.)
There are some aspects of Paul which tick the conservative box in that he comes across as a sex negative asexual who uses part of his soapbox to preach his own distain by insisting that pleasure in sex is bad and linking the idea of anything but purely reproductive sex with a spiritual uncleanliness and immorality. It fuels a lot of bad shit from purity doctrine to anti-same sex relationship rhetoric.
Not that sexual control over women and reproduction particularly hasn’t been a worldwide phenomenon but instilling pleasure and sex directly to sin really linked in to all the conservative bullshit that Paul’s hijacked letters contained so I feel like there’s a bit of a “depends on your definition of conservative” thing.