What I find most astounding (not to gloat or anything certainly) is that it's a lot of the non-believers that are picking up on the "Paulist" doctrine in the churches. Many non-believers still have a lot of respect for Jesus, but they have little to no respect for Paul.
Therefore, wouldn't it make more sense for Christians to actually be... well Christian? Instead of continually pushing the doctrine of Paul on their believers, and on the non-believers who clearly do not agree with, and do not like... Paul?
It's not really off topic, because it relates to the 'change' that many feel is necessary.
In order to understand the apparent difference between Jesus and Paul, it is necessary to realise that they addressed very different constituencies. Jesus was born into the unique tradition that had been started with Abraham- by Jesus- in order to create the context for his mission and ministry. That spiritual and moral context was the characteristic of a culture that had been intended to inform other cultures (including Babylonia, Egypt, Greece and Rome) of the nature of deity, and of the nature of mankind; and also that a Messiah was promised for mankind.
His identity was an integral part of that mission, and the culture he created was the context for his ministry. He made no attempt to reach beyond it, leaving it to his followers to do that. The most prominent of these was Paul of Tarsus, doubly qualified as a 'professional' of the Messianic culture, and intimately familiar with the contemporary, Graeco-Roman world- as well as holding Roman citizenship. This 'pagan' world had very different moral standards, that in some cases were notorious even within itself. By contrast, those of the Messianic one, one might say, hopefully without giving offence, had produced those who had been 'house-trained'; so part of Paul's task was to ensure that those outside the Messianic culture were made fully aware of what was required of them morally. Paul stayed very close to the Messianic 'hymn sheet' in this, citing or quoting it very frequently to justify his standards as being
not his own, and only very rarely stipulating anything that was not directly attributable to the Messianic culture.
So Paul differed in no way whatever from Jesus, who also cited and quoted the same hymn sheet (the OT/Tanakh), though he had no need to remind his own highly legalistic culture on many moral issues. Paul, otoh, was explicit, listing all the evils he could think of, because addressing a 'pagan' culture as ours is; so he is frequently seen as enjoining a stricter morality than that of Jesus. But this is a myth, and one that is, one suspects, deliberately cultured to try to persuade Christians into changing their views on moral issues.
