What if there was no St. Paul of Tarsus?

At church today, my priest mentioned Paul, and that got me thinking, that what if there was no Paul, or if Paul remained Saul. Would Christianity eventually have spread to the Gentiles, or would Christians focus on just converting Jews? Would Arabs rule the world, without Christendom to stop them from advancing into Europe?!?!:eek:
 
Paul's writings (and those attributed to Paul though written by someone else), were not the only Christian writings circulating in the Roman Empire from the 1st to 3rd centuries CE. Other epistles attributed to various apostles and disciples circulated among the Jesus followers. "Sayings Gospels", like the Gospel of Thomas, offered a different literary style focused on discrete parables rather than the linear narratives found in the canonical Gospels.

The widespread currency of these "apocryphal" works suggests that gentile populations were reading diverse types of early Christian literature. Different communities read different writings, depending on availability and patterns of dissemination. The later decision to include Paul (and deutero-Pauline) letters in the canon of the New Testament inadequately reflects the diversity of literature connected with the early Jesus movement.
 
At church today, my priest mentioned Paul, and that got me thinking, that what if there was no Paul, or if Paul remained Saul. Would Christianity eventually have spread to the Gentiles, or would Christians focus on just converting Jews? Would Arabs rule the world, without Christendom to stop them from advancing into Europe?!?!:eek:

Honestly, I doubt that it would have a great effect on the spread of christianity, at least in the short term. As proximefactum noted, there were a lot of gospels, and a lot of interpretations floating around in the realm of early Christianity, and Paul's importance really stems from the widespread canonical adoption of his epistles into the new testament. In other words, Christianity will for a time be relatively similar to what we know, with the major differences only cropping up centuries later when orthodox versions of the new testament are being hashed out (and even then it is quite possible that somebody else simply takes Paul's place).

And the bit about the arabs is spurious. It may take a while for the effects of this change to be noticable, but the ripples are almost certainly going to be substantial; probably enough to ensure that, even if a man named Muhammad is born to the Quraysh tribe centuries later (by no means assured), he will probably never become a prophet.
 
Would Arabs rule the world, without Christendom to stop them from advancing into Europe?!?!:eek:

I don't know if Christianity would have remained an obscure sect of Judaism if there hadn't been a St. Paul, but it is certain that the loss of Christianity would not have doomed Europe to conquest by the Arabs. Without Islam, the Arabs would not have had the impulse to go forth and conquer the Middle East, let alone Europe. And without Christianity, there would not have been an Islam.
 

MrP

Banned
I think we've a couple of threads on this in the depths of this part of the forum. Consensus, IIRC, was that Christianity would either a) have been substantially different or b) crashed and burned without St Paul's adaptations to the more Jewish original framework. Roughly speaking.
 
In case the Acts convey the right general message in this point,
the Paul was the first to suggest baptism of Heathens (= non-Jews) without prior circumcision.
Of course there were non-Jewish Christians before the Jerusalem compromise
outside the sphere of influence of Paul
(cf. the allusion in John: The Greeks who want to see Jesus).
But it is unsure if a pragmatic way of joining the new "way" and thus wide spread
in the Hellenstic world would have taken place, or would have taken place as rapidly.
 
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