April 16, 2011 – 2 Corinthians 11:7 - 11:33

I talked about the movie, “Peter and Paul” before.  I did watch “St. Peter” and thought it was a much more accurate portrayal, yet still had some issues.  In “Peter and Paul” this portion of the letter to Corinthians is seemingly used to support one of the central plots of the movie.  St. Paul had gone out and made churches in many cities while the Apostles hid in Jerusalem.  After St. Paul did this, the Jewish Christians were upset and went to St. Paul’s churches and told them to believe differently that what St. Paul was teaching.  Basically here we have the teaching of faith alone verses maintaining the Jewish traditions.  I don’t argue that this was done and that there were disagreements between the early Church about what needed to happen with the Gentiles that converted.  This disagreement was taken up in Jerusalem’s first counsel and discussed in Acts.  It was resolved by St. Peter making a decision.  Even after that, there appears times when St. Paul chastised St. Peter for being a hypocrite at times for acting one way among the Gentiles and another among the Jews. 

All that being said, you really get a very harsh sense from St. Paul regarding Christians that are teaching other that what he taught.  He basically calls them Satan dressed like angels of light.  This just gives you a sense of how much he cared about the salvation of the souls that he preached to.  St. Paul appears to have one gear, and that is full out toward whatever goal is in front of him.  I do find that this comes across in the movie and he reflects on it being a flaw of his because he sometimes acts in selfishness.  He acted this way as a Jew, going fully to persecute the Christians when he felt they were blaspheming, and appears to have the same mentality after his conversion. 

The movie portrays him as being very bitter because there is a period of years after his conversion where he is not called upon to do anything and is abandoned.  This causes him, after he starts to preach again, to have a chip on his shoulder against the Jewish Christians.  The one thing I did find helpful from both movies is just the sense of the difficulty in the beginnings of Christianity and how completely different this belief was compared to what people were used to.  It gives you a real sense of awh in the fact that it started as small as it did and yet grew to where it did and is still around today.