You all convinced me, I'm now an Atheist!!!

[Davka]

Pretty much.

That and Paul's whole rant on the subject, in which he says that the Torah (law) was a baby-sitter for the Jews until Jesus came along. Paul pretty much ignores everything Jesus said on the subject in the Gospels, leading to the conclusion that Paul never actually read the Gospels.

So those who claim to "follow the canonical teachings of Jesus", would reject the idea that the Old Testament is no longer required. And conversely, those who follow Paul's idea that Jesus fulfilled the law and now we don't have to pay attention to it would say... what? That they just find Paul's ideas more appealing? I would've thought that Jesus would have the final say on this kind of thing seeing as he is God.

This is one of the many contradictions that occur when you slap together an anthology of writings from various sources across a thousand-plus years and call them "inspired scripture." Then you're forced to reconcile all those contradictions via hand-waving and pretzel logic.

The NT has a whole bunch of arguments regarding the Law. Jesus says that not even the tiniest Hebrew letter ('jot,' or yod) or diacritic ('tittle') will pass away, and that he came to fulfill the Law (torah). Since the Early Church only began to grow when they stopped trying to convert the Jews and went instead to the Gentiles, they had to deal with this problem somehow.

Gentiles didn't want to keep the Torah. It's a pain in the ass, and you can't eat bacon. Paul actually calls out Peter on the issue at one point, because Peter was hanging out with Gentiles and eating lots of yummy pork when he thought nobody was looking, but would suddenly get all pious and Orthodox Jewish when Paul (or the other Jewish disciples) came around.

So when the time came to decide which books were inspired and which weren't (hint: the ones that gave centralized power to Rome were inspired), the Church Fathers had to try to reconcile the Law that YHWH said was forever and ever with the actual practices of Gentile Christians. the result is an entertaining clusterfuck.