Thread: The Unforgivable Sin

The Unforgivable Sin

The Unforgivable Sin is explained in the 12th Chapter of the Gospel of Mathew. What precipitated Christ making comment about it was the accusation by some Pharisees, the lawyers of their day, that He was using demonic powers to cast out demons and heal the blind. Jesus makes a few arguments to appease their sense for rationality, but sums it all up by insisting that to characterize Divine Power as demonic power is such an egregious insult that it can never be forgiven. Doing Good is never bad, and to maintain that Good is only being done for Evil ends, that is an accusation so destructive of Social Order that it can never be allowed or condoned. What can come of a Civilization where Virtue and Goodness come under accusation?

Today there is a saying – “No good deed goes unpunished”. It is just one of so many signs that our Civilization is in the throes of collapse.

Those already familiar with my writings know that I have been insisting that Paul was the Antichrist, and that his influence upon Christian Doctrine and Christian Culture still exercises a powerful antichristical influence. I have dozens of reasons for supposing so, but in this case I can show that Paul himself had committed the Unforgivable Sin. If you consult the 14th Chapter of the 2nd Letter to the Corinthians we have Paul claiming that Satan himself appears as an Angel of Light and that the servants of Satan take on lifestyles of Righteousness only as a disguise. Hmmmmm. Is this not exactly the same argument that the Pharisee was using to discredit Christ only a few years before? And we know Christ’s answer to it, don’t we. So it is really a wonder that the Christian World had every forgiven Paul, even besides making a “Saint” out of him.

You know, it may be more than a mere coincidence, that the unnamed Pharisee and Paul make the same argument against Divine Miracles and both equally impugn the motivations of those who behave righteously. It may very well be likely that the Pharisee who accused Christ was Paul himself.

It is remarkable that none of the Church writings tell us of Paul’s origins. The first we hear about Paul that he was the Gentlemen in charge of setting a mob of thugs to murder Stephen, a Christian recently elected to take over for Peter who had swiftly lost popularity after having had murdered Ananias and Sapphira while shaking them down for money. It is significant that of all the Pharisees (lawyers) in Jerusalem, the one who would be hired to involve himself with the Christian Community would be Paul. This certainly must indicate a prior involvement, some expertise that Paul was assuming in regards to this Sect and its followers. It is more than likely then, that in references regarding Lawyers following around Christ and making legalistic arguments to embarrass His Teachings, that we should more than suspect that it was Paul. This would go far in explaining why we hear nothing about the career of Paul while Christ was still alive, since we could assume that the information would an embarrassment to him.

To Paul this argument that Miracles were signs of Evil and that Acts of Righteousness were only fronts for demonic motives, this was not just idle speculation and theorizing. You see, Paul had set himself against the Messianic Factions of the True Apostolic Community. That Community was so vibrant within the Fruit of the Vine of Christ and was so possessed of the Holy Spirit that the Miracles and Righteousness of Christ persisted within it. Paul’s own congregations must have heard about this, and it would have made them wonder why they had no miracles and that Paul was more about collections and contributions then about any Righteousness. Indeed, all of his talk was more about being forgiven of Sin and diatribes against the Law – more the talk of a rebel or an Anarchist then of an Apostle, no? So to quiet the grumblings and the doubts against him, Paul went on the attack, using the same argument he had previously used against Christ Himself, that Miraculous Powers were of the Devil and acts of Good Will were only the tools of a deception.

Christians point out that the same argument occurs again in the Gospel of Mark, in the 13th Chapter, where we find the author describing Jesus suddenly caught up on speculation about the future – the destruction of Jerusalem and that all miracles and righteousness would only be manifested exclusively by the Devil for the sake of fooling the elect. Biblical Scholars, who ordinarily describe the Gospel of Mark as being the most primitive of the Outlines for the other Synoptic Gospels are surprised by this passage as it uses Paulist terminologies from far in the future. It seems obvious that paulist doctrine was superimposed into this Gospel of Mark – a flagrant re-writing of History. When we look at the theme and agenda of the Gospel of Mark, we see a reluctant Messiah embarrassed by the pretence of any political destiny who was only biding his time waiting for the appropriate time to put himself forward to be murdered. It is the Paulist view of Jesus as a Non-Messiah, reduced to a mere sacrifice – Super Man reduced to glorified sheep.

But when reading the Gospel of Mark, we need to consider the source. Mark was a mixed up man. We hear of him in the Book of Acts where Paul decided to fire him for insubordination, you see, as Paul thought he was boss of everybody. This in turn gives us more insight into the character of Paul, because we have the understanding that Paul was working from his own boss, Barnabas, who told Paul that he hadn’t the authority to fire Mark… that the decision was his own, that is Barnabas’s to make. Well, Paul who was incensed with the ‘insubordination’ of Mark toward him, used this occasion to walk out on Barnabas and start his own Church.

Now, in the Acts, written by Luke, which is at times so honest concerning Paul that we can discern the true evil of the man, we yet have instances described which make us wonder whether Luke’s veracity was under some kind of duress. Indeed, we can notice that while the surface most ‘facts’ are ostensively for Paul, the intellectual undercurrent goes incisively against him, which would make me suspect that Luke was being supervised in his writing by barely literate overseers, happy with what they could understand that was being said of Paul their master, but not sophisticated enough to catch the more complete nuances being drawn out for those of keener discernment.

The most puzzling ‘fact’ noted in the Book of Acts was the publication of the Franchise Letter of Paul’s Gentile Church, in Chapter 15. We are left to suppose that the Messianic Church decided to allow a competing Church with different doctrines to rise up in direct competition to itself. We are told that Paul would have to abide to next to no conditions at all, that he veritably had a completely free hand to teach whatever he wanted, in the Name of Christ. That is simply NOT how any Organization would conduct business. There are always clauses and paragraphs and subparagraphs and understandings and limitations and restrictions. Such a legalistic document would have been daunting and imposing. But, then, most telling is that this Franchise Letter nowhere exists – Paul does not mention it in any of his writings (although in Galatians he mentions an understanding with Peter that he would have the Gentile Franchise, and indeed it later lead to conflict between the two of them when Peter was exiled from Jerusalem, for whatever reason, and began to infringe upon Paul’s monopoly), and none of the Apostles in their letters mention such a Franchise Letter. The Paulist Church was able to save all 14 of Paul’s Apostolic Letters, but was not able to retain, or even copy its very Foundational Document. No. If such a Letter authorizing a Paulist Church had ever existed, it would have been saved… it would have been quoted… every Congregation would have had its own copy made. Or maybe it did exist, but when Paul walked out on Barnabas, Barnabas, the Boss, kept the Letter and thus kept the Franchise. Paul’s efforts were then those of a rogue. Or perhaps when Paul decided to teach his own Doctrines, in violation to the understandings embodied in the contractual Franchise Letter, it was determined expedient to destroy the Letter – to rip up a contract when he no longer approved the terms.

But this brings us back to the Gospel of Mark and its author. If Paul’s insistence that Mark be fired lead to, or was an excuse for, Paul’s going renegade, then how is it that Mark subsequently went back to work for Paul? Or for that matter, since Mark was such a second rate person – being fired by one person here and needing to be argued for by that person there – it would seem that he would not be much of a man to be considered in his own right. So who would care about a book written by a mere lackey – rebellious and insubordinate at one time, but crawling back at another. An ‘employee’. He probably wrote what he was told to write.

And so it is that where Jesus describes the Unforgivable Sin in the Gospel of Mathew as the willful attribution of Miraculous Goodness to the Principalities of Evil, we have the very opposite arguments in Paul’s Letters and from Paul’s flunky Mark where we are asked to believe that every Supernatural Capacity and all Appearances of Goodness and Light are projections from Satan intended only to fool us. And it should make us all wonder that those who would have us believe that they spend their every spare moment committing scripture to heart and memory… it should make us wonder that they have never spotted these discrepancies. Or perhaps they have such spacious minds that they can easily believe one way when they read and think of one passage, and think just the opposite when they come across the others. And then they must suppose it wonderful to have a Bible that always gives them an appropriate quote, whether they wish to point out one idea or argument, or when they should wish to express exactly the opposite. What some smaller and overly fastidious minds would see as contradictions, these great Biblical Scholars see as a Broad Truth that can cover all of their bases. But still it bothers me that, again in Mathew, the most Jewish and least Paulist of the Gospels, that Christ expressly sides with a Narrow Truth, and speaks of the Wide Way as leading to an ultimate destruction.