Now we shall proceed to address the second of Clayton Douglas’ Paul-bashing articles, SAUL OF TARSUS AND HIS DOCTRINE OF LAWLESSNESS, which he published in the January, 2004 edition of his Free American Newsmagazine. Douglas, while attempting to discredit Paul of Tarsus, instead consistently discredits his own person by making all sorts of false accusations and inconsistent statements. And, while claiming to be a Christian, he even rejects the cardinal tenets of Christianity found throughout the prophets and confirmed by the gospels: that Yahshua Christ was the Messiah and Redeemer of our race. While in this second article Douglas often merely repackages the trash he spewed in his first article, which I hope to have already discussed sufficiently, he does add new twists and additional claims as he proceeds, and so this second article must also be addressed in its entirety.
<Section #61A> Clayton Douglas states: “Paul of Tarsus was an agent and spy of both the Roman state and these ultra-fundamentalist hypocrite sects (Edomite/ Pharisees).”
In reply to section <#61A>: We have previously seen Douglas state that Paul was a Roman soldier assigned to spying on all of the sects in Judaea, in sections <#12>, <#13> and <#14> of this response on pp. 51-55, and where it was established that such a statement has no merit. Here Douglas makes Paul some sort of double-agent, working for the Romans and the Pharisees. While it is evident that Paul was a Pharisee, and in his persecution of Christians he was acting in an official capacity for the temple, here Douglas seems rather to be covering all bases by making such a blanket statement, adjusting the script to his novel so that it won’t clash quite so starkly with the factual accounts. Nevertheless, Douglas could never establish with truth that Paul was a Roman soldier, agent, or held any post for the empire. Such a statement by Douglas is only a fabricated lie!
<Section #61B> Clayton Douglas states: “Paul was also an active conspirator in the assault on ‘Stephen,’ in Acts 7:58.”
In reply to section <#61B>: Yet the record at Acts 7:58 and 8:1 shows clearly that Paul was only a passive observer in Stephen’s death, who merely kept the garments of the men perpetrating the acts against Stephen, and approving of their deeds. While Paul is not without guilt in the matter (i.e. Lev. 5:1, Rom. 1:32), he was no active participant. If Douglas cannot get the smallest of accounts straight, how can he be trusted with the larger?
<Section #62> Clayton Douglas states: “In Acts 9:22-26 it is said that Paul ‘baffled’ the Jews living in Damascus. ‘But Paul increased more in strength, and baffled the Jews who lived at Damascus, proving that this is the Christ...’
“(There were no people called ‘jews’ during this time period. In any event, this group wasn’t the only group Paul has been trifling with over the centuries. To baffle is to bewitch ... and to deceive.)”
In reply to section <#62>: Here Douglas takes the verb “baffle”, where instead in the A.V. the word συγχύνω (4797) is “confound”, and not only does he blatantly misdefine the word, but he does so after abusing its context. First, the Greek word συγχύνω (sugchuno), a form of the verb συγχέω (sugcheo, still 4797 in Strong’s), means “to confound” (Liddell & Scott), and not at all does the word mean “to bewitch ... and to deceive”, as Douglas so nefariously states. And even the word “baffle” has no such meaning as Douglas claims. In The American Heritage College Dictionary baffle is “1. To frustrate or check (a person) by confusing or perplexing; stymie”, and “2. To impede the force or movement of”, where it has other definitions as a noun. Yet Clayton Douglas makes no citations from any dictionary, because he would rather fabricate a lie! It is clear from the account in Acts that the Judaeans of Damascus were confounded, or confused. Having been expecting Paul’s arrival to harass them he rather arrived as one of them, a Christian, having been converted by Yahshua Christ Himself while en route to the city.
It is odd that here Clayton Douglas makes a correct observation concerning the word “jews”, being so late in his articles, and having already used the word so very often himself, and quoting jews such as Marcus Ravage in his assault on Paul, where Ravage claims that both Paul and Yahshua Christ were “jews” (see p. 96 and section <#40> of this response). In all of my writing, I endeavor to use the correct term, “Judaean”, when referring to the people of Judaea generally. Yet whenever the specific bad-fig Canaanites or Edomites among the Judaeans are those being referred to, those who reject Christ and His teachings, I may anachronistically use the term “jew”, because those are the people from whom today’s jews obtain their religion and identity, and from whom a great number of today’s jews have descended in part. Yet Douglas throughout his articles has used the terms “jew”, “jews” and “jewish”, capitalized or not, quite indiscriminately.
<Section #63> Clayton Douglas states: “Did you know that Jesus’ own Disciples were both ‘afraid of him’ and didn’t believe ‘that he was a disciple?’ Or, don’t you really care?”
In reply to section <#63>: Douglas’ inane argument here comes directly from the account in Acts. Of course the original disciples were initially wary of Paul, and had every right to be cautious of him because he was at the beginning a persecutor of the Christians. This is no secret, and as we have seen in section <#59> of this response on p. 118, Paul both admitted and regretted his actions. Yet these same accounts to which Douglas refers, and gets half of his story from, tell us that in a short time all of Yahshua’s disciples did accept Paul, and accept him fully! This is readily apparent at Acts 9:23-31, where we are told that the Christians delivered Paul from the unbelieving jews, and where Paul was afterwards accepted by the disciples at Jerusalem. In Acts chapters 14 and 15 we see Paul was accepted at Antioch by the Christians there, but his teaching was challenged by certain judaizing disciples. Yet upon being heard by the elders of the disciples in Jerusalem, Paul was not only accepted but fully vindicated! Clayton Douglas, a pawn and a patsy for jews and miscreants, relates only the parts of Acts, or any of the New Testament, which can be abused in order to uphold the positions of the jews and the miscreants! Yet Douglas’ rantings get even more ridiculous.
<Section #64> Clayton Douglas states: “... The Dead Sea Scrolls show us that ‘Damascus’ was the name of the Qumran community of Essenes. It was on his way to visit these revolutionaries, that Paul claims to have been stopped by a ‘vision’.”
In reply to section <#64>: This may be one of the most ridiculous statements I have ever seen concerning the geography of first century Palestine. It is so ludicrous, it’s an absolute pity that it requires any attention at all. Discussing the geography of Syria, Strabo says: “The city of Damascus is also a noteworthy city, having been, I might almost say, even the most famous of the cities in that part of the world in the time of the Persian empire” (Geography, 16.2.20). Damascus was a prominent city in Syria, which had been there for many, many centuries, even in the time of Abraham! The city is first mentioned in the Bible at Genesis 14:15 and it is still there today. Strabo wrote just before 25 A.D. In the context of Genesis chapter 14, the name Damascus appears in the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Genesis Apocryphon, or 1QapGen ar, Column XXII. But the name Damascus also appears several times in the document that, by reason of the city’s mention, is popularly called the Damascus Document. The copies of this document found at Qumran are found in the fragments designated 4Q266 through 4Q273, 5Q12 and 6Q15. Yet other copies of the Damascus Document were found outside of Qumran, and included in publications of the Dead Sea Scrolls because they are obviously copies of the same document. These are in the university library at Cambridge, England, and were discovered at Cairo in Egypt. They are designated in scroll publications as CD-A and CD-B.
Using Douglas’ silly logic, perhaps we should call Cairo “Damascus”, and not Qumran. There is nothing in the Dead Sea Scrolls which link the scrolls to Qumran, except that they happen to have been found nearby. Going to a motel in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and finding a Gideon Bible in the drawer, would you imagine yourself to be standing at the very place where certain events took place? I hope not! Such is the logic of Clayton Douglas: “Damascus” being found in documents at Qumran, we will relocate the name to that place. Ridiculous! Douglas is an idiot!
While the name “Damascus” appears often in the Damascus Document, there is nothing which would lead us to believe that Damascus was a code-word for Qumran, rather than the name of the well-known Syrian city which it so obviously was. The Damascus Document often refers to Israelites in the “land of Damascus” for one simple reason: it is relating the sect’s perception of prophecy fulfilled, as the sect saw it, and a certain prophecy in Amos (at 5:27) warns the disobedient Israelites that they were going to be carried away “beyond Damascus.”
Further indication that Paul’s Damascus was the city in Syria can be found in the N.T. itself. Paul’s Damascus was a large place, with streets and houses (i.e. Acts 9:11), and more than one synagogue (Acts 9:20), and walls and gates (Acts 9:24-25). Qumran was nothing of the sort! All of the archaeology of Qumran shows that the place was never more than a small compound, perhaps the size of a large Roman villa at the most. There are countless books and articles describing as much. Damascus had an ethnarch (2 Cor. 11:32) whom Paul mentions by name, something not seen anywhere in the Qumran sect’s documents. Again, Qumran was in Judaea. Yet Damascus is called a “foreign” city, i.e. outside of Judaea! This is evident at Acts 26:11 (cf. 26:20). With all of this, Clayton Douglas can only be one of two things: a purposeful deceiver or a total idiot.
<Section #65> Clayton Douglas states: “To the mystics, Prophets and revolutionaries of that day, Paul’s vision seemed as nothing more than a cop-out for why he was claiming his Romanized message to be in line with the clearly anti-Roman teachings of Jesus.”
In reply to section <#65>: As for “mystics” and “revolutionaries” I cannot comment, except to say that Clayton Douglas is preoccupied with magic and magicians, having quoted from several of them from the very beginning of his Paul-bashing articles. And Clayton Douglas is also fascinated by revolutionaries, as he has so often in his articles put his lot with men such as Friedrich “God is dead” Nietzsche, who ended up in an insane asylum at the age of 45, and “Bishop” John S. Spong who was a revolutionary indeed, being at the vanguard of the integrationist Civil Rights movement, being the first Episcopalian Bishop to ordain homosexual ministers, and being a chorus-leader for the acceptance of homosexual “marriage”. These are the “revolutionaries” Clayton Douglas loves and follows!
Paul’s message was certainly not “Romanized”. If such were so, Paul could not have been imprisoned at Rome and executed by Nero! Why would Rome hold prisoner and kill such an ally? Why would Rome execute such a supposedly faithful agent, which Douglas claims that Paul was? Neither was Yahshua Christ “anti-Roman”. If He were, how could Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, insist on letting Him go free, finding no fault in Him (i.e. John 19:4, 6, 12)? Clayton Douglas is a deceiver, and an idiot! It has previously been demonstrated, in section <#8> of this response on p. 44, that Paul did not, and could not, teach anything concerning temporal governments that would be in defiance of the prophecies concerning temporal governments, and neither would Yahshua Christ. Clayton Douglas, scoffing at Paul, makes himself a fool because he doesn’t understand the prophets. Notice again, that Douglas attributes certain “anti-Roman” teachings to Christ, but makes no citations! If Christ had taught such things, Douglas would gladly have pointed them out!
