St. Paul, Geography and Islam

St. Paul The Apostle

As we know, Muslims like to blame St. Paul for Christianity turning out how it did.  In other words, if the documents that tell us about Jesus Christ and the early Church tell us something different than what a 7th century illiterate Arab from the Hijaz tells us, St. Paul is the culprit.  This wasn’t always the case.  Early Muslims didn’t talk negatively about St. Paul.  It took a few centuries to put this narrative in place.

I wanted to look at the locations where St. Paul’s 13 epistles were written.  I’ve left out Hebrews because although I believe it to be Pauline, it’s a bit different since St. Paul’s name isn’t originally on it.  Still, let’s look at the location of his epistles.

Romans – Italy

1 Corinthians – Greece

2 Corinthians – Greece

Galatians – Turkey

Ephesians – Turkey

Philippians – Greece

Colossians – Turkey

1 Thessalonians – Greece

2 Thessalonians – Greece

1 Timothy – Turkey

2 Timothy – Turkey

Titus – Greece

Philemon – Turkey

We have Italy, Turkey and Greece.  We know from the book of Acts that he was in the Holy Land, and Syria.  We also know from Romans that he planned to go to Spain though whether he made it there remains an open question.

So we have our map.  St. Paul did ministry and wrote letters to people in the Middle East, Turkey, Greece, Italy and possibly Spain.  You’ll notice that a place where he didn’t write letters was northern Africa.  In the early Church, Alexandria and Carthage played a very vital role.  In fact, at the Council of Nicaea, Alexandria was given a Patriarchate along with Antioch and Rome in Canon 6.

If St. Paul is the big baddy that the Muslims make him out to be, shouldn’t the Islamic faith have flourished in North Africa in the first few centuries of the Church.  It’s not there.  Just like Italy and Asia Minor, it’s just not there.  Like the rest of the Christian world, there were heresies in North Africa in the early centuries but none of them resemble Islam.  Arianism would be the closest and while the Christology of Arianism is more friendly to Islam, Arianism is far from Islam.  It should also be pointed out that the main proponent of Arianism wasn’t Arius, but Eusebius of Nicomedia.  Nicomedia is in modern day Turkey not too far from Istanbul.

Apparently St. Paul is so powerful that he can kill Islam in an entire region without writing a letter or even doing any ministry there.  Pretty impressive if you ask me.  St. Paul had to write a letter to the Galatian churches to crush the false Galatian teachers and their heresy.  I should also point out that their heresy was teaching that you had to obey all the Torah laws for salvation.  Obviously that’s anathema to Islam since the Torah is a corrupted false document that a prophet of God(the Islamic Jesus) would never have taught.

There is a much easier explanation for all of this.  Northern Africa didn’t have any Muslims until they arrived in 640 AD.  In fact, the world didn’t have any Muslims until 610 AD when Muhammad became Muslim in Mecca.  St. Paul spread the teachings of Christ and the apostles.  He never preached against Islam since the religion didn’t exist for over half a millennium after he was dead.