This is simply not true. The New Testament has a radically different view of God. The OT god lies to Adam (saying he will die in the day he eats the tree not that he will go on living and his descendants will be tormented with disease and pain on this earth and then in hell afterwards) and he brags to Ezekiel about how he deceives the prophets. He also tempts Abraham to do evil, to murder his own son. But the New Testament God Paul says “cannot lie” and James says “he does not tempt any man to do evil.”

What you need to do is look at 2nd Cor 4:4 long and hard and try to figure out how anyone could take the phrase “the god of this world” to refer to anything or anyone other than the creator of this world (i.e. the OT god) without being forced by some overarching and punative authority to do so (either the church or one’s parents). Paul certainly didn’t mean anything other than the creator when he said ‘the god of this world.’

The original Marcionite theology of Paul is shining through a crack in the Catholic redaction. You will note that all of the most confusing passages in Paul are those in which he seeks to interpret the OT in harmony with the gospel somehow. He gets bogged down to the point that he has to flatly contradict the very OT passage he is quoting or take it out of context. He reverses the roles of Esau and Jacob and of Sarah and Hagar to prove his point because the text as is can’t do it. Why all this confusion? Because Paul was a Marcionite, the origin of Marcionism, and the Catholic editor is trying to make him a Catholic and he has a hard time littering Paul’s letters with OT references because he knows that the gospel and the OT do not really fit with one another.

The idea that Jesus is the public face of the OT god, and that Jesus gave the law is blasphemy, for the OT god says in the (Num 31:17-18) “kill everyone, boys, men, women who are not virgins–but save the young virgin girls for yourselves (wink wink)”–will you seriously argue in good ‘Catholic’ fashion that Jesus is the one who gave this abominable commandment? (Protestants are Catholics too, because I only use Catholic to distinguish those who believe Jesus was the OT god from Marcionites who believe he was a Better God who came to oppose the OT god and save us from the OT god.)

Remember also that even in the OT, 2 Sam 24:1 and 1 Chr 21:1 show that the OT god is Satan, for in one Yahweh provokes David to number Israel, but in the other Satan does–they are therefore one and the same person.

So then, the original gospel is not that Jesus is the psychotic OT god and that Jesus crucified his own self to save us from himself. The original gospel is that Jesus is the Better God who came and did good to provoke the OT god to crucify him, so that being dead he could descend into hell and empty it of the righteous and take them to his Father in the 3rd Heaven, and then he would descend again to our world and confront the OT god, make him beg for his life, and he would ransom us from the OT god by holding his death (the fact that the OT god had crucified him in return for the good he did to his creatures) over the OT god (kinda like blackmail).

- Josh