Why do you think the most widely practiced religion in the Western world is built almost entirely on letters from a man who never even met Jesus?

Well, I think it's the most useful method of control that they could come up with at the time because when Paul's letters were canonized, you know, during the fourth century and beyond by various

councils, they needed one version of Christianity that they could control, they being the Roman

Empire, because Constantine had just come out of a civil war. The empire was very divided,

and it seems that they found Christianity, at least Paul's

version of things, to be the most useful doctrine to control people.

You're listening to Mind Love with me, Melissa Monty.

I'm the kind of person who wonders, did it even happen the way they say it did? You know what I mean?

Like, like, you can take it at face value. You can go a little bit deeper and wonder, okay, these other people came like, oh, let's use this narrative as control.

And you could take it even deeper.

Was Paul part of that plan?

He was originally killing Christians.

And now all of a sudden, he had this epiphany, this spiritual awakening that showed him

this other side that still wasn't what Jesus said anyways.

Exactly. It's highly suspect. I do think there are reasons. There's at least some circumstantial

evidence to suggest that Paul may have been working for the Romans or the Herodians, which were the, you know, the Herodian dynasty.

That was Rome's administrator for the region.

And I think it's important to remember that the blood atonement sacrifice system of the Jewish temple at the time in Jerusalem was one of the largest sources of tax revenue for the Roman Empire.

And the Herodians were in charge of administering Palestine, Israel, whatever you want to call it,

collecting that tax revenue.

The temple was a big part of that.

They had oversight on who the high priest was.

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