It is the Demiurge, the highest magistrate in heaven, whom the gnostic Valentine calls a godlike angel, and of whom the rabbis said, "His name is like unto the name of his Master."
This central figure, blended with the messianic speculations of that age, with the doctrines of Peter and the nascent Church, combined in Paul's mind to one mystic conception of the "Son of God," intelligible to pagan ears. So he went forth and proclaimed Jesus of Nazareth the Son of God. In substance, the expression is about the same as Metathron and Synadelphos, and the office which Paul ascribed to Jesus is precisely of the same nature with that which the Cabalists ascribed to the angel who was the Saar Haolom, the prince or ruler of this world, who stands before God, or also sits before him, as Paul's Jesus stands before God or sits at his right hand. It is precisely the same in both systems, the names only are changed; so that it is difficult to decide whether Paul was or the rabbis were the authors of the metathronic speculations, especially as these two angels only have Greek names, while all others are Hebrew or Chaldæan, and later Cabalists frequently put down Joshua or Jesus in the place of Metathron.
Those who believe that Acher's dualism of the Deity was the Persian Ormuzd and Ahriman, hence a good and an evil principle, and that Metathron never was an evil demon, are as decidedly mistaken as those who believe that Paul had more than one God. Paul's Son of God and Acher's Metathron are the same central figure before the throne of God, and the two authors are identical.
In that world of secret thoughts Paul discovered the harmonization of discordant speculations and the remedy for all existing evils. "The world must be regenerated by a new religion," was his great ideal. The ancient religions and the philosophies have produced the corruption which rages universally. They must be swept away. Society must be reconstructed on a new basis, and this basis is in the theology and ethics of Israel, separated and liberated from their climatical and national limitations, their peculiar Jewish garb. There was no hope left of saving the Jewish nationality and political organization from the hands of omnipotent Rome, which swallowed and neutralized kingdoms and nations with wonderful ease; nor was there any particular necessity for it if society at large was reconstructed on the new basis. The object of Jesus was to reconstruct the kingdom of heaven in Israel, and he was crucified. All Israel had the same object in view, and stood at the brink of dissolution. If the basis and principles of the kingdom of heaven became the postulate of society at large, Jesus is resurrected in the world, and Israel is saved, was Paul's main idea.
The Pharisean rabbis hoped that this would come to pass at some future day, when, they maintained, all sacrifices and all laws would be abolished, and all the nations of the earth would be one family, with one God and one moral law. Paul seized upon the idea, and added to it the simple dogma of Peter, "The Messiah has come." That hoped-for future is now. God's promise to Abraham, "And there shall be blessed by thee, and by thy seed, all the families of the earth," is to be fulfilled at once. So he came forth from his mystical paradise an apostle of Jesus and a new redeemer of Israel. He argued exactly as the Pharisean doctors did who maintained that the Messiah would come when all mankind should be guilty or all righteous. In the estimation of Paul, at that particular time all mankind was corrupt and demoralized, and so that was the time for the Messiah to make his appearance.
He went to work at once. He began to preach his new Christianity at Damascus about the year 51, and found out that the world was not prepared for his ideas. He had a narrow escape at Damascus, where the governor and soldiers pursued him. Like the spies at Jericho, he was let down in a basket over the city walls and made his escape. So he narrates the story. The author of the Acts, true to his hostility to the Jews, of course brings them in as the persecutors. But Paul, in general, never speaks otherwise than with the highest regard and love of his kinsmen and his brothers according to the flesh.
The failure at Damascus did not discourage Paul. It only convinced him that he was too young—he could not at that time have been much over twenty-one years; that he was not sufficiently prepared for the great enterprise; that it was not such an easy task to throw down the superannuated heathenism and to reorganize society on a new basis. He retired into Arabia and remained there nearly three years, to perfect a plan of operation. Nearly three years he spent in silent contemplation, to discover the proper means, to take the right hold upon the heathen world, and to unfurl a new banner of heaven upon this wicked earth. In 53 or 54 we meet him again at Antioch, with his new and original gospel—the gospel for the Gentiles—prepared for his mission and ready to embark in the great enterprise, to wage active war upon all existing systems of religion and philosophy, and to replace all of them by Paul's gospel. He had been in Jerusalem fifteen days, had conversed with Peter and nobody else, but he repeatedly tells us that he had taken advice of none, consulted none, was appointed by nobody, and learned nothing of anybody. The gospel was his gospel, and he was an apostle by the appointment of God Almighty himself, who had revealed his Son to him. In Antioch he established the first congregation of Jews and Gentiles, and called them Christians. So Paul was the actual author of Christianity among the Gentiles.
What was Paul's gospel? Paul, setting out on his journeys with the great idea of converting heathens, was obliged to paganize the Gospel. The heathens knew nothing of the Jewish Messiah, and he gave him the name popularly known among them—he called him the Son of God, which was a common name in mythology. The Son of God and Mary was a term as popular among heathens as it was foreign to the Jews, among whom Jesus was to remain the Messiah, only that he became also the Metathron. This explained to Jewish mystics the possibility of the second advent, and gave a metaphysical foundation to the resurrection doctrine. The kingdom of heaven, or the theocracy, was another unintelligible idea to the heathen. Israel's laws and form of government were as odious and decried among the pagans as the hostility to that people was fierce and implacable. Paul made thereof a theological kingdom of heaven, when all the dead shall resurrect in spiritual bodies, and the living shall be changed accordingly, together with this earth and all that is thereon; and declared all the laws of Israel abrogated, so that only the spirit thereof, the precepts and not the laws, should be obligatory in the new state of society.
The sins and wickedness of the world are forgiven to all who believe in the Son, and whose flesh is crucified with him, to resurrect with him in purity; for he died a vicarious atonement for all. He was the last sacrifice, to blot out the sins of all who have faith in him.
The Crucified One did not resurrect merely in the spirit, of which the heathens could not form a satisfactory conception, because the immortality of the soul was by no means a general belief among them, and their gods were no spirits; he resurrected in his very body, and was caught up to heaven, to sit or stand there at God's right hand, to come down again in proper time. "Here, then, is your tangible proof of immortality," he said to the heathens. "Like the Crucified One, all of you will resurrect from the dead, or be changed on the day of judgment." This was plain language to heathens, who knew that but lately Cæsar had been caught up to heaven as Romulus was before him, and asked no questions as to how a human body can rise in the atmosphere and become incorruptible; none as to what means above or below, up or down, as to where God is and where he is not, where his right hand, where before and where behind him; or as to whether the world is full of his glory. No such questions were asked, and there was the ocular demonstration of immortality, tangible and intelligible to the grossest intellect.