I think the point is precisely that Law is not the point, and therefore that external behavior is really not the point.  Oh, it is a good thing, of course.  I suspect that Jesus would agree with the Epistle of James (How can you have faith without works?) long before he would agree with Luther's doctrine of salvation sola fide.  But what is central is your soul and how it relates to God.  What is central is that the Kingdom of God is within you, here and now, and your actions are relevant only symptomatically: nobody who could bring himself to do X can possibly be relating to God the right way, so if you are doing X then it's time to quit it and get with the program.  (In this context, I read Jesus's frequent exhortations to his followers to believe in him to mean something like the famous Nike ads -- "Just Do It!")

In other words, I think that Jesus was (primarily) preaching not a doctrine but a practice or an experience -- the experience of having God directly in your life.  This involves a kind of practice or behavior, to be sure; but think of Strauss's famous conversation with Jacob Klein about the role of morality.  You recall that Strauss says that for the philosopher all virtues are purely instrumental: the important thing is to philosophize, and the philosopher lives an ascetic life because it helps him think ... not because he believes asceticism to be important in its own right.  He draws a comparison with a jockey, who lives ascetically so that he can win races ... but for the jockey what is important is winning races, not asceticsim for its own sake.  By the same token, I think that for Jesus (as for Strauss) the Law is secondary or instrumental.  (Of course, while Strauss says philosophy is the primary goal, Jesus says it is God.)  Just as Strauss says that a man who is habitually drunk cannot philosophize, and therefore chronic drunkenness is bad; so Jesus says that if you do this or this or this then you cannot have God alive in you, so don't do those things.  But unlike Moses he never lays down these remarks as a system, because he is not primarily concerned with articulating a Law or founding a School ... and this is because no rote application of any law or doctrine will bring God into your life.  You have to have the right attitude ... in effect, you have to be the right person; and being the right person starts on the inside.  So while I think it is clear that Jesus would have had no ear for whining, I think it is not so clear that he would care first about people getting up and doing something.  There were plenty of men of affairs in Roman Judaea, and Jesus doesn't appear to have been one of them.  He never -- so to speak -- "built a cathedral" or "produced a scholarly edition" of anything.  What he did was to do things that required the active, concrete presence of God in his life: heal the sick, the blind, and the lame; feed the hungry; walk on water; raise the dead ... that kind of thing.  And he told his disciples that if only they would learn what he was trying to teach them, they could do the same works and greater still.  It is true that he is here preaching a kind of action, but it is action of a special kind that relies on doing some internal work on yourself first.  Nowadays, "internal work on yourself" is the province of psychology; but for this reason, while I agree that many psychologists have made a hash of Jesus's teachings (to say nothing of what they have done to the logoV thV yuchV) I am not so ready as you are to say they don't belong on the territory in the first place.

The short summary is that while I agree that a focus on the Inner Man as opposed to the Outer Man can be terribly abused, and runs the risk of encouraging just the kind of self-absorption you have been talking about, I don't think it is actually untrue to the apparent intentions of Jesus.

OK, of the three points you make that one was probably the easiest to quibble with.  But let me go on to the next one.  You say that Christianity (and especially modern Christianity) encourages weakness instead of strength, by talking too much about how God helps those who can't help themselves.  I think you are right, but precariously so; or, to put it another way, the correct point that you are making lies along a narrow footpath high in the mountains -- one false step, and you land in the canyons below.  Because it is certainly true that Jesus preached an active spirituality instead of a passive one: remember the parable of the three servants given talents to invest, and how the master was angry with the one who buried his talent in the ground instead of making a profit from it.  At the same time, succor of the weak is an unavoidable part of Jesus's message as well and there are all his blessings of the poor in spirit (et al.) to account for.  So which is it?

I think one way to approach this question is to ask "Who is strong?"  At first this sounds obvious, but the man who looks strong on the outside may not feel strong on the inside.  Sometimes he leaves a record of his inner life afterwards, so that we can see what was going on inside.  For example, if we had no record of the inner life of Martin Luther we would surely judge him a strong man.  Nobody else living in his generation -- or century -- had such an impact on the face of Europe.  The things that he accomplished look like the works of tremendous strength.  And yet we know that inside he was a seething mass of neurotic fears.  Was his an active spirituality, or a passive one?  Should Christians be encouraged to emulate the courage of Luther's "Here I stand," or does that require also emulating his terror of failing to confess a forgotten, momentary sin?  And where is such a man to get help?

My point is that even the (apparently) strong man can need help, sometimes in desperate ways over (seemingly) small things.  Our judgments from the outside about what should be big for the strong man, and what small, are probably not the same as those made by the strong man himself.  So where should he turn for help?  To us, so that we can snicker at him for being afraid of things we suppose to be trivial?  Maybe so, although it sounds like awfully hard luck for him ... but why shouldn't he be able to ask help of God?  And why shouldn't God be willing to give it?  Of course, to allow him to seek help from God requires an acceptance of a certain kind of religiosity, and it is one you plainly don't think much of.  But I'm not sure the alternative is ultimately any better.  That alternative, after all, is a church of the Stiff-Upper-Lip.  Such a church may drive better external behavior from common men, but it requires them to lie to themselves (and to God) about who they are.  The cost of failing to be brave and strong is so high under such a dispensation that normal men (who sometimes fail in foolish ways) will have to create shields, or masks, to hide behind.  These masks will be made of the pretense that the men who wear them are always brave and strong; and they will cling to these masks even if they have to lie relentlessly to themselves to do so.  But what good is this?  A spirituality that requires systematic self-deception?  A spirituality that cannot admit to shameful truths because there is no way to accommodate them?  This may be a spirituality that encourages Homeric heroes, which may make it superior to most of what we have on the religious market today.  But you cannot hope to deceive God with the same line of garbage that you use to deceive your neighbors or yourself.  You cannot talk to God through a mask.  If your goal is to be able to talk with God (which is what I think Jesus was teaching), you have to be able to face up to the truth about who you are, even when that truth isn't pretty.  And that, in turn, requires a religiosity that accepts even shameful weaknesses in strong men; a religiosity that allows that even heroes weep, and that is willing to let God dry their tears.

Of course, it all depends on what you want.  Again, if your only concern is to drive the right kind of external behavior, then a church of the Stiff-Upper-Lip may be the best place to put your money.  I think that this is part of what Homer teaches, if you gloss over the fact that Homer is more subtle than this in a hundred ways.  But keeping a stiff upper lip does nothing to reconcile your inner self -- your feeling self -- to the troubles, disappointments, or pains that you encounter in life.  Does that matter?  Well, if you do nothing to transmute those pains and disappointments into something else, they fester; after a time they can distill into cynicism and resentment of a truly poisonous kind.  Haven't you known people whose lives are poisoned by resentment, because they've never gotten the brass ring that they have coveted all their lives, or because everything always seems to turn sour for them somehow?  I remember talking to some friends of my parents shortly after they retired, and the wife said to me "Well [my husband] was lucky to find a career that he really enjoyed and that really fulfilled him -- but for me it was just one crappy job after another."  Now is this any way to live?  I hope you agree that it isn't.  And I think the alternative, at least in the sphere of religion, is to allow room to take your failures and disappointments directly to God -- even to berate him for them -- and then to let him console you.  Without such consolation you may do the right things externally, but you can't be expected to forgive those who hurt or disappointed you.  And without forgiveness -- which is surely one of the key elements in all of Jesus's teachings -- you may at best have a new legal school, a new form of Phariseeism; but you will not have Christianity.

There is a smaller point to be made here, too.  You say that some of Paul's encouragements might be appropriate when Christians were being fed to the lions, but are wasted on trivia instead.  Why waste God's love and attention consoling some poor shnook for his acne when there are wars and famines and persecutions and all manner of disasters out there requiring God's attention instead?  Why call God in for the little stuff instead of saving him for the big stuff?  I think the answer to this depends on just how limited God's resources of love, compassion, and consolation really are.  If he has a finite account of agape to draw checks on, well then by all means save the spending for some place where you can get the maximum bang for the buck.  But if God is infinite, as all Christian churches teach, then there should be no risk of emptying his account by squandering love on small people and over small issues.  In fact, by comparison with the infinite, all finite quantities are equally small: if God is truly infinite, then from his perspective the poor shnook with the acne and the annihilation of planet Earth are the same size problem.  So if it is fair to call on him for support in the one case, why not the other?

Regarding your explanation of the differences between Paul and Jesus: I am perfectly prepared to believe everything you say on the subject, but I think there may be something problematic about simply pitching Paul overboard to drown.  I admit up front that I have not read all of the Pauline letters; and I consider some of the doctrines I have heard attributed to Paul to be just silly.  On the other hand, I also believe that a human writer can be valuable -- even divinely inspired -- and also wrong about some things.  So I do not think it would be right to abandon Paul on purely doctrinal grounds, even if his doctrines end up looking silly.

Well, you might ask, what else does Paul have to offer us if not his doctrines?  After all, he never knew Jesus personally.  And I answer, Exactly.  He never knew Jesus personally (in the flesh) -- and neither do we!  So in what way can somebody today be a Christian?  Well, the normal way of following somebody after he dies is to collect all his teachings in a book somewhere and then to study them and try to implement them in daily life.  If we do this, then our knowledge of our Teacher is a literary and historical kind of knowledge, one that can be acquired and improved by scholarship.  It is an ink-stained knowledge like the knowledge that legal scholars have of the Law.  And this is the way we know Confucius and Plato; more to the point, it is the way we know Rabbi Shammai and Rabbi Hillel.

And in that case there is no fundamental difference between Christianity and Phariseeism, because both of them depend on the scholarly study of books of doctrines.  As I suggested above, I think this is a basic distortion of Jesus's teaching.  I am persuaded that for Jesus, the doctrines and the Law -- while not irrelevant -- were never the main point; if that is all we have left today, then somehow we have saved the window-dressing and lost the window.  Now, you could fairly argue that we have no choice.  It would be logical to ask "What else can we have besides the books of parables and doctrines? If you say we should know something else in order to be Christians -- if, for example, we need to know Jesus personally -- then how can we possibly do this over such an expanse of time?"  I agree that this is a fair question, but I think this is the question that Paul answers for us.  In other words, whether Paul's doctrines are right or not, he gives us an example of how it is possible to know Jesus in a personal way (not a literary or historical or scholarly way) even though he isn't walking around in the flesh any more.  It sounds crazy on the surface, but I know many people who say with a straight face that they do know Jesus this way ... and I am reluctant to say that they are psychotic without knowing myself, personally, what makes them say it.  I mean, they don't act psychotic.  And logically I have to admit that if I haven't stood where they stand and seen what they see, I should be a little slow to tell them that they are wrong.  After all, it is very easy to say that Jupiter can't have moons because they would disrupt the numerological perfection of the heavens ... until you look through a telescope and see them.  Since there are so many apparently sane people who say that they know Jesus personally, as a friend, they may be on to something.

Of course there is a risk of self-delusion here.  And of course this is where textual scholarship comes into its own, so that one can say "Maybe you think you had a vision where Jesus told you to do X, but in all the manuscripts he is reported as saying that X is a very bad thing."  Some people address this problem in a way that I cannot agree with, by insisting that the best defense against self-delusion is a belief in the literal inerrancy of the printed Scripture.  Then (I surmise) if you hear a voice telling you to do something consistent with Scripture, it is probably from God; if the voice tells you to do something in conflict with Scripture, it is probably a temptation of the Enemy.  My understanding of how these texts have come down to us through history makes it impossible for me to follow this particular path.  The best that I have to put in its place is an appeal to the native moral sense that is born into most of us; but I know that's weaker and harder to interpret than any printed text, and I also know that there could be reasons besides the need for moral certainty which could make a person want to know for sure "Was that really Jesus I heard just now?"  The question how to avoid self-delusion in experiences like this is a hard one, and I don't claim to be able to answer it conclusively.  But I do think that it is inadequate to rule the question out of bounds on the ground that Paul's private visions are none of our concern and shouldn't be repeated by right-thinking Christians.  Since (if I am right) the whole core of Jesus's ministry was teaching the experience of having God directly in your life, then it looks logical that people who experience Jesus directly in their lives are somehow on the right track.

By the way, my emphasis on Paul's experience and not his doctrines should help alleviate another concern.  As I say, there are people who quote Paul as the source of some very odd beliefs, and I haven't read enough to know if they are misreading him or not.  But I would argue that Paul's importance has nothing to do with "beliefs" anyway.  Paul shows us that a certain kind of experience is possible, and implicitly invites us to have the same experience.  That's not a matter of purely subjective certainty, because presumably he really did have this experience, whatever else may be said of him.  Whether the doctrines that he extracted from this experience are all true or not is another matter; I certainly don't claim that they have to be.  But I do think that having Christ within you is somehow a fundamental part of being a Christian, in a way that makes being a Christian qualitatively different from being a Confucian or a Platonist or an Aristotelian or a Marxist. And for this reason, I don't think we can expect Paul to go away any time soon.