John the Baptist, Mary, Jesus, and Paul

Dr. Rey,

Who is more important in the Christian religion from a religious studies point of view?
John the Baptist, Mother Mary, Jesus, or Paul?
From an academic perspective, who changed history?

Thank you for your time


-Anonymous


Anonymous,


Thank you for such an exhilaratingly interesting question! I would have to say that, while each of these characters (John the Baptist, Mary, Jesus, and Paul) played a vital role in the shaping of Christianity, Paul outshines all other figures in the development and history of Christianity. To put it quite simply, Paul acted as one of the best promoters of all time in order to spread his personal interpretation of the messages supposedly conveyed by Jesus to his followers. The time in which Jesus was supposedly preaching to his followers seems to be the relatively short stretch of time between the death of John the Baptist and his own death. As I tell many of my students, it’s always best to look at Christianity as if it were a popular West End show: consider John the Baptist to be the playwright, Mary as the female lead, Jesus as the protagonist (or antagonist, depending purely upon your personal feelings towards Christianity as a belief system) and Paul as the critic who wrote a shining review of the performance. While that kind of an approach might seem somewhat glib, it often explains a very good point – playwrights and critics tend to be the most important and least recognized contributors to a performance while the actresses and actors executing a performance tend to get more attention than any clear thinking person ever believes is appropriate. Now, to understand how Paul changed history, it’s extremely important to remember that the oldest Christian writings that we have available to us were, in every likelihood, composed by Paul; as is the case in most belief systems, the first contributor to the canon is the best remembered and the most obeyed. Not at all surprising is the fact that the opinions and interpretations of Paul are the very things that constitute the greater proportion of what might be described as Christian morality today.
I’ll finish by writing that this is an inordinately complex sort of topic that I hope to discuss again in the future!