Even if not stated, take everything as being my opinion. An opinion based on having studied with Baha'is and to have gone on several of their "Mass Teaching" projects... by the things I've learned from Baha'is here. Baha'is, in my opinion, want nothing to do with a living Savior.
IMO the
true meaning of "Savior" was distorted by
Paul. By the time of the church fathers a
new religion according to
Paul who never in person ever met the
earthly Jesus was established wherein the Gospel
of Jesus was transformed into a gospel
about Jesus, again, of course, according to Paul who ignored and
disobeyed Peter upon which Jesus said he would build his church. As H. M. Balyuzi put it in his book entitled "Baha'u'llah, "Thus Jesus raised Peter above the rest of His disciples. It has been said that what Jesus meant was not setting up a station particular to Peter, but that He would build His Church upon Peter's faith and confession. For just then this disciple had told his Master:
'Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.' (
Mathew 16:16). However, Jesus made His purpose unequivocally clear when He went on to say:
'And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven." (
Mathew 16:19). pp. 118-119.
So in order to
elaborate further I will cite the
following passages translated from German in a book written by Udo Schaefer, a German Baha'i, entitled "The Light Shineth in Darkness:
"The most essential and effective alteration of Jesus's message carried out by Paul was in his denying the
Law's power of salvation by replacing the idea of the Covenant, the objective principle of the Jewish religion, with faith in Christ and in the atoning power of his sacrificial death; the concrete Mosaic law with a mystical doctrine of salvation. Here the Cause of God was robbed of its proper center and transformed into a mixture of Judaism, Christianity and paganism. The original community recognized the devastating effect of the "Apostle to the Gentiles' and did not watch it passively. The Jerusalem community sent teachers ('false brethren', Paul called them) to the new communities founded by Paul; they taught the true doctrine to the believers only just won for the Faith and opposed the doctrine taught by Paul. Paul was such a controversial figure that Tertullian, in his pamphlet attacking Marcion, called him 'Apostle to the Heretics', and the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies declared him a false teacher, even indeed the
anti-Christ.
This was the 'Fall' of Christianity: that Paul with his 'Gospel', which became the core of Christian dogma formation, conquered the world, while the historic basis of Christianity was declared a heresy, the preservers of the original branded as 'Ebionites'. As Schopes puts it, the heresy-hunters 'accused the Ebionites of a lapse or relapse into Judaism, whereas they were really only the Conservatives who could not go along with the Pauline-cum-Hellenistic elaborations. Schonfield comes to the same conclusion: 'This Christianity in its teaching about Jesus continued in the tradition it had inherited, and could justifiably regard Pauline and catholic Christianity as heretical. It was not, as its opponents alleged, Jewish Christianity which debased the person of Jesus, but the Church in general which was misled into
deifying him. 'Pauline heresy served as the basis for Christian orthodoxy, and the
legitimate Church was outlawed as
heretical'. The 'small handful of true Christians' was
Nazarene Christianity, which was already extinct in the fourth century.
It is worthy of note that there were
striking similarities between this
Christianity and
Islam. Above all in Christology: in the faith of the original community Jesus was the new Moses, the Son of Gad as 'testified' by the
adoptive act of
baptism. This Christology, which corresponds completely to that of the
Qur'an, was considered by the Pauline Church, together with obedience to the 'Jewish' law, as characteristic of the Ebionite heresy. These similarities discovered by research are ambiguous, of course. The scholar inclined towards Church dogma, who cannot see
Islam as anything but a mixture of Arab paganism, Judaism and Christianity, finds the evidence that Muhammad was 'bred' (Schlatter) on the Judaeo-Christian tradition, that he had borrowed his credal ideas from Judaeo-Christian thought. On the other hand the
Baha'i, oriented towards the doctrine of cyclically recurring revelation and convinced of the mission of
Islam, find these results of research--in the light of the unity of religions extremely instructive because they are a sufficient explanation for the discrepancy between orthodox Church doctrine and doctrine of the
post-Biblical religion, and because they show where the
original truth was preserved: not in the pagan-Christian Greater Church based on Paul, but in the Jewish Christianity contemptuously branded as 'Ebionism'. On this point,
Islam, according to the divine plan for salvation, was among other things the
authoritative new confirmation of the credal truths preserved in
Nazarene Christianity but lost to the
Greater Church.
The centerpiece then, of Christian credal doctrine, that of Redemption, is something of which--in the judgment of the theologian E. Grimm--Jesus himself knew nothing; and it goes back to Paul. This is even admitted by some Catholics: 'Christianity today mostly means Paul.' And Wilhelm Nestle stated--as noted also by Sabet--'Christianity is the religion founded by Paul which replaces the Gospel of Jesus by a gospel about Jesus. So also, Schonfield: 'Paul produced an amalgamation of ideas which, however unintentionally, did give rise to a new religion.'" pp. 82-85
(Continued)
, even though it is against God's law to do so.
