Paul versus Jesus: Redemption Through Repentance, or Discovery of Moral Purpose?

Whence came the Apostle Paul's concern with the redemption of the soul predicated on its purification? We must recall that Paul was once Saul, a religious officer assigned to hunt down and bring to rectification Jews lapsing into heretical practices. So much of orthodoxy in Judaism, then as now, concerned itself with obtaining and maintaining ritual purity in terms of cleanliness of dietary intake, personal cleanliness, cleanliness of abode, cleanliness of sanctuary, and sexual cleanliness. Should we be surprised that when Saul of Tarsus became Paul the Visionary, and joined the heretical Christian Jews he once persecuted, that he should take these native concepts of cleanliness to the next level? If Jesus was the Messiah, and his messianic mission was the redemption of humankind for an afterlife in God's grace, then how might human beings facilitate this? The Hereafter was concerned not with the earthly body but the soul. But if the soul had become soiled by the sinful temptations of the Earth while it inhabited a physical body, how might it be made clean and pure again for the afterlife? If the story of Adam and Eve's casting out from the Garden of Eden had for Jews been largely one to explain the doleful imperfection of Man's earthly existence, Paul took it one step further and used it to explain why God had to send a sacrificial manifestation of himself as the "Son of Man" in order to make it possible for human souls to regain "Eden" in Heaven. In short, we are all disposed toward sin, because our souls are soiled from birth by a hereditary sin from the original parents of humankind, the disobedient Adam and Eve. This line of interpretation may have been reinforced by the fact that Paul was also a Hellenized Jew, meaning his teachings reflect the influence of Hellenic philosophical doctrine, including Platonist notions of the cosmic separation of the spiritual and material worlds, and the separateness of the soul from the body it temporarily inhabits. Such an un-holistic approach (in fact, a dichotomous approach) tends to assign the moral good to matters spiritual and to fostering the independence of the soul from the needs and desires of the body. In this scheme, the physical and material universe tends to get associated with impurity and moral filth, that part of the cosmos representing the most distant and therefore corrupted emanations of creation from the Godhead. Thus material forces and concerns represent impediments to moral clarity and salvation in Platonist thinking. Extreme meditations on this dichotomization of reality led some men and women to seek and construct lives of varying degrees of asceticism, as either communal monks or self-denying hermits, living in the materially dead worlds of the desert or other marginal landscapes, or even in artificial ones created in the midst of fertile places of worldly society, such as by sitting for years upon tall pillars set above the hubbub of humanity (forgive my irreverence -- impurity of thought, if you will, but as I understand that food and drink were hoisted up by these so-called "Pillarists", provided by devotees below, where did the feces and urine of these ascetics go? -- oh, the philosophical irony of it all, but I digress!). If Paul had not fallen under the influence of polarized Greek philosophical teaching, he might have been more like Jesus. Although Jesus was concerned with cultivating proper inward moral attitudes toward others, such as that of men toward women, he was more concerned with encouraging people to construct a living, working moral society ("the Kingdom of the lord is at hand all around you!"). The question of salvation, if we limit it to what Jesus taught while he was alive here on Earth, seems to be more about cultivating moral fellowship with all people, whatever Paul later claimed about the supernatural efficacy of Jesus' death. In fact, Jesus betrays a contempt for the theoretical (and supernatural) notions of purity, which obsessed the Platonist Greeks. Jesus denied (and even defied) the right of Man to pronounce ultimate judgment on any fellow human being, whether it be upon a husbandless woman who sold her body to feed herself and her children, or a socially ostracized tax collector who had enriched himself from skimming off the top of his fiscal territory. For Jesus, no one was lost to the power of any stain upon one's soul, self-inflicted or otherwise. Implicitly, one comes away with the feeling that Jesus believed in our fundamental goodness, because he demonstrated that everyone could be brought back into the Kingdom of spiritual siblinghood through compassionate inclusiveness. If we were fundamentally sinful creatures, irrevocably polluted by Adam's Fall from God's Grace, inherently unworthy of salvation but by the acceptance of Divine Sacrifice, such simple teachings of forgiveness and befriendment that Jesus taught could have no moral efficacy. Jesus does not ask people to hate themselves as fallen creatures, or hold themselves in contempt, such that we deny our own individual capacity to bring goodness into the world . In fact, Jesus urged us not to "hide our light under a bushel basket"! Grace for Jesus was not waiting for him to be crucified and then celebrating his sacrificial death as our means to salvation. Grace for Jesus was simply accepting the extended hand of spiritual love, a social act of grace and redemption between human beings. In compassionate fellowship with each other, human beings could discover their true moral nature. Perhaps the Pelagians were less wrongheaded than at first glance. Recall the Book of Ruth from the Hebrew Testament, where a lone and bereft foreign woman of moral potential brings herself into a social fold of mercy and friendship and loving betrothal with a community of committed spirituality. Jesus would have been raised on this story, the quintessential parable of spiritual salvation through social grace, a central and reforming tenet of the Jewish Prophets, which they had been instilling in their people for centuries. Jesus as a prophet on Earth was of this lineage, however much the Gospel of John may seek to deny it. Paul, however, did not entirely fail to grasp the original simplicity and Jewishness of Jesus' primary message; just recall what Paul said of love in his Letter to the Romans.