Pauline Mirror Syndrome

There is no escaping Paul. To become a Christian is, in some measure, to place your trust in him. You must accept that the man who never met the historical Jesus became, through his Damascus conversion and subsequent revelations, an apostle every bit as legitimate as those who had walked beside Christ in Galilee. More than that, you must believe that Paul’s visions conferred an authority so profound that he became Christianity’s most influential interpreter, the man whose voice would ultimately drown out nearly all the others.

For many believers, this poses no difficulty. Paul is the heroic convert, the fearless missionary, the brilliant theologian who carried Christianity into the Gentile world.

For others, he is a problem.

His letters often pulse with an unnerving competitiveness. He dismisses rivals with astonishing confidence, defends his authority with relentless vigor, and repeatedly reminds his readers that his gospel came not from human teachers but by direct revelation from Christ. To admirers, this is prophetic certainty. To skeptics, it can sound perilously close to grandiosity. His confidence is so complete that it occasionally borders on solipsism, as though the final court of appeal were not the testimony of others but the private theater of his own mind.

In The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère imagines Paul regarding the Jerusalem apostles with something approaching contempt. Their understanding of Jesus, rooted in firsthand acquaintance, strikes Paul as merely “Christ according to the flesh.” Carrère compares him to “those critics who prefer not to read the books or see the films they review to be sure that their judgment won’t be swayed by the work in question.” 

It is a devastating image. Paul becomes the supreme authority precisely because he refuses to be constrained by eyewitnesses.

Some readers find this exhilarating.

Others experience what I call apostolic recoil: the instinctive revulsion one feels toward a revered religious figure whose personality seems morally or psychologically suspect despite his canonical status.

I belonged to that second camp almost from the beginning.

I remember sitting in church when I was seventeen as a member of the choir introduced a hymn. His face glowed with affection as he announced that Paul was his favorite apostle. The warmth in his voice startled me because it exposed the opposite reaction within myself. I disliked Paul with remarkable intensity. He struck me as arrogant, combative, ambitious, and intoxicated by his own authority.

The realization filled me with shame.

I was a new Christian, yet I harbored deep hostility toward the man who had done more than anyone else to shape Christianity. Surely this could not bode well for my faith. I was suffering from canonical dissonance: the unsettling psychological conflict that arises when one reveres a religious tradition while distrusting one of its indispensable architects.

What did this say about the authenticity of my conversion? Had I embraced Christianity while instinctively rejecting its chief interpreter?

Decades later, my opinion of Paul has become more nuanced but no less conflicted. Emmanuel Carrère has supplied historical and psychological reasons to question Paul’s extraordinary self-confidence, yet I have gradually come to suspect that my resistance originates somewhere far less flattering.

Perhaps the problem is not Paul.

Perhaps the problem is me.

I recognize too much of myself in him.

His ambition.

His vanity.

His hunger to be right.

His tendency to trust the authority of his own mind.

When I recoil from Paul, I may simply be recoiling from my own reflection.

I call this Pauline Mirror Syndrome: the unsettling experience of rejecting the Apostle Paul because one recognizes in him the very flaws one struggles to forgive in oneself.

The mirror is often more difficult to face than the man standing inside it.