Last night, as I was crying over the deathbed scene of John D. Rockefeller in 1937, as described in Titan, the mind wandered, and I suddenly recalled a conversation I had with a Talmudic scholar in Kharkov, Ukraine, about eleven years ago.
The guy was a relic, whose line had surprisingly survived the socialist dictatorship, not to mention the German occupation.....although it's probably superfluous to point out the attrition in his family tree was enormous; perhaps five or six live today, where five or six hundred might be living if all this repression and death had not happened.
Anyway.
I forget how our conversation got to this point, but he mentioned that Judaism had been founded by God, while Christianity had been founded by a mere mortal, Paul.
Okay, I was not going to argue this point, especially since my host was not denying Christ as the Foundation of Christianity; only that Christ provided the ball, but then Paul got the ball rolling.
And so that thought lay fallow in the mind for eleven years.
While while having increased secretions of the lachrymal glands over the death of John D. Rockefeller, out of the blue something suddenly occurred to me.
What about Peter?
That event where Christ told Peter that whatever he bound on earth would similarly be bound in Heaven, surely occurred years and years and years before Saul of Taursus was illuminated on the road to Damascus.
Now, I do NOT want to turn this into a Catholic-vs-Protestant discussion; I just need some historical enlightenment here. I'm curious as to why the Talmudic scholar "blamed" Paul and not Peter.
Does anybody know what Peter was doing, between the Death and Resurrection of Christ, and the emergence of Paul? Perhaps--and I mean this honestly--Peter was just wandering around, not sure what he should be doing, and so generally doing nothing?
I assume Peter was not as extroverted and outgoing as Paul, and so it's easy to understand how the more forceful personality would emerge as the "leader." And, obviously, it didn't hurt that this second personality had prolific writing skills, as compared with the first.
Any historical illumination on this?