The World’s Oldest Profession Isn't What You Think

The world’s oldest profession isn’t what you think

People joke that prostitution is the “world’s oldest profession,” but if you look at the earliest human societies, the first specialized social role—the first job that wasn’t hunting, gathering, or child‑rearing—wasn’t sex work.

It was the person who mediated between the tribe and the unseen world.

Long before there were kings, merchants, or soldiers, there were shamans, priests, and ritual leaders: the ones who interpreted dreams, spoke to spirits, buried the dead with ceremony, watched the stars, and told the stories that made sense of storms, sickness, birth, and death. In that sense, the priesthood isn’t just a profession; it’s arguably the first

Paul, Joseph Smith, and the Invention of Religious Narratives

What if the dominant version of a religion isn’t shaped by the original teacher, but by a later interpreter who never actually knew them? That’s the uncomfortable question that hangs over both early Christianity and Mormonism. In Christianity, the key figure is the apostle Paul. In Mormonism, it’s Joseph Smith. Both stand at a strange angle to the “founder” at the center of their faiths, and both end up defining what that faith becomes.

This article compares Paul and Joseph Smith as narrative architects, looks at how their stories fit into the sociology of new religious movements, and ends with a provocation: maybe religion really is the world’s oldest profession—not in the cheap, cynical sense, but in the deeper sense of crafting meaning, identity, and power through story.

Paul: The Theologian Who Never Met Jesus

Paul never met Jesus during Jesus’s lifetime. His authority comes from a visionary encounter with the risen Christ and from what he calls direct revelation, not from walking with Jesus in Galilee. His letters, written in the 50s CE, are the earliest Christian documents we have—decades before the Gospels. That means the first written Christian theology comes from someone who knew Jesus only as a cosmic, resurrected figure, not as a teacher, healer, or storyteller.

Hyam Maccoby famously pushed this to its sharpest edge in The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity, arguing that Paul, not Jesus, was the true founder of Christianity, fusing elements of Judaism, pagan mystery cults, and Gnostic ideas into a new religion centered on the crucified and risen Christ. While many scholars think Maccoby overstates the case, the core point is widely accepted: Paul’s letters are the earliest and most theologically dominant texts in the New Testament, and Christianity as it developed is deeply Pauline in structure and emphasis.

Where the Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew, Luke) emphasize Jesus’s teaching on the Kingdom of God, ethics, and apocalyptic warning, Paul emphasizes atonement, faith, grace, and the cosmic significance of the resurrection. Christianity as a lived religion—creeds, doctrines of salvation, the centrality of the cross—is much closer to Paul’s vision than to the historical Jesus’s Jewish apocalyptic preaching.

Joseph Smith: The Prophet of a New Sacred History

Joseph Smith stands in a similar but more radical position. He doesn’t reinterpret a teacher he once knew; he claims to restore a lost, ancient Christianity through new revelation. In the 1820s and 1830s, Smith produces the Book of Mormon, followed by the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price. These texts don’t just comment on the Bible—they expand the sacred timeline, placing ancient Israelites in the Americas, narrating centuries of hidden history, and reframing the story of Christ in a new geographical and cultural setting.

Like Paul, Smith claims direct revelation and unique authority. Where Paul insists his gospel came “not from man” but through revelation of Jesus Christ, Smith claims angelic visitations, golden plates, and divinely guided translation. Both men position themselves as the ones who truly understand what God is doing, even over against existing religious authorities of their time.

Smith’s project is explicitly restorationist: mainstream Christianity has fallen into apostasy, and only a new prophet with new scripture can restore the “fullness of the gospel.” The result is a distinct religious identity—Latter-day Saints—with its own cosmology, priesthood structure, afterlife, and communal life. Just as Paul’s letters become the backbone of Christian theology, Smith’s revelations become the backbone of Mormon doctrine.

Side-by-side comparison: Paul and Joseph Smith

Dimension	Paul (Christianity)	Joseph Smith (Mormonism)
Relationship to central figure	Never met Jesus in life; knows the risen Christ through visions and revelation.	Never met ancient Nephites or the historical Jesus; claims visions, angels, and revealed texts.
Earliest writings	Letters (~50s CE) are the earliest Christian documents; predate the Gospels.	Book of Mormon (1830) and subsequent revelations define early LDS theology.
Relation to existing tradition	Reinterprets Judaism into a universal, Gentile-inclusive faith centered on Christ.	Reinterprets Christianity as apostate and in need of restoration through new scripture.
Mode of authority	Claims direct revelation from Christ; asserts apostolic authority alongside or above other apostles.	Claims direct revelation from God and angels; asserts restored priesthood authority.
Narrative strategy	Connects Jesus to Adam, Abraham, and the Hebrew Bible; creates a cosmic Christ.	Extends biblical history into the Americas; creates a new sacred history of ancient peoples.
Canonical impact	Letters become central to the New Testament; Christianity becomes heavily Pauline.	Revelations become LDS canon; Mormonism is structurally Joseph-Smithian.
Historical distance	Near-contemporary to Jesus; knows Jesus’s brother James and Peter.	Separated by 1800 years from the events he narrates; no historical continuity with ancient Israel.
Type of founder	Reinterpretive theologian of an existing movement.	Restorationist prophet claiming to recover a lost, original faith.

New religious movements and the craft of narrative

From a sociological perspective, both early Christianity and Mormonism are classic examples of new religious movements. They emerge in contested religious environments, led by charismatic figures who claim special access to the divine, and they stabilize over time into institutions, doctrines, and communities. The details differ, but the pattern is familiar.

Sociologists of religion often note a few recurring features in such movements:

Charismatic authority: A founder whose personal claims to revelation or insight override existing structures.
Reframing of tradition: The new movement doesn’t appear out of nowhere; it reinterprets an older tradition as incomplete, corrupted, or misunderstood.
New scripture or doctrine: Fresh texts or teachings that anchor the new identity and differentiate it from the parent tradition.
Boundary-making: Clear lines between insiders and outsiders, often through doctrine, practice, or community life.
Institutionalization: After the founder’s death, the movement either fragments or consolidates under new leadership and structures.

Paul and Joseph Smith both fit this pattern. Paul reframes Judaism around Christ and opens the door to Gentiles; Smith reframes Christianity around restoration and new scripture. Both create narratives that reach backward in time, claiming that their movement is not a novelty but the true continuation or recovery of what God was always doing.

Religion as the oldest profession

Calling religion “the world’s oldest profession” is usually meant as a jab, but there’s a deeper, more unsettling truth in it. Long before there were states, corporations, or universities, there were people who:

told stories about ultimate reality,
claimed special access to the divine,
organized communities around those stories,
and mediated power, meaning, and morality through narrative.

In that sense, religion is one of humanity’s oldest “professions” in the broadest sense: a specialized role in which some people craft, guard, and reinterpret the stories that tell us who we are, where we came from, and what we owe each other. Paul and Joseph Smith are not anomalies; they are vivid, well-documented examples of a pattern that stretches back as far as we have records.

You don’t have to accept their claims to see the craft at work. Both men take inherited symbols, texts, and expectations and reassemble them into something new. Both insist that their version is the true one. Both succeed in persuading communities to live, die, and organize their entire lives around those narratives.

Why this comparison matters

Putting Paul and Joseph Smith side by side doesn’t flatten their differences; it sharpens the question of how religions are actually made. Not in the abstract, but in the messy, human process of:

reinterpreting the past,
claiming revelation,
writing new texts,
and persuading others to inhabit that story.

If Christianity is, in large part, Paul’s religion about Jesus, and Mormonism is Joseph Smith’s restoration of a lost Christianity, then the deeper through-line is this: religions are not just inherited—they are continually authored. And the people who do that authoring, whether in the first century or the nineteenth, are practicing one of humanity’s oldest professions: the crafting of sacred narrative.

Christian values aren’t Christian: the Greek and Roman backbone

If Paul and Joseph Smith show us how religious narratives are authored from the inside, then the story of “Christian values” in America shows how those narratives are later blended with entirely different intellectual traditions and quietly rebranded as sacred. What most Americans call “Christian values” are, in practice, a hybrid of biblical language, Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Enlightenment political theory dressed up as a single, seamless inheritance.

In Christian Values Aren’t Christian: How Greek and Roman Philosophy Became America’s “Sacred” Inheritance, I argue that much of what passes for “Christian morality” in the modern West—ideas about natural law, rational ethics, civic virtue, the dignity of the individual, and ordered liberty—owes as much to Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Cicero, and Roman republicanism as it does to anything in the New Testament. The Sermon on the Mount sits alongside, and often in tension with, a Greco-Roman and Enlightenment framework that emphasizes reason, hierarchy, civic duty, and the rule of law.

Once you see that, a pattern emerges across all three cases:

Paul reframes Jesus within a Hellenistic-Jewish world and creates a new theological center of gravity.
Joseph Smith reframes Christianity through a nineteenth-century American lens of restoration, frontier myth, and new scripture.
Modern “Christian values” reframe both through Greek, Roman, and Enlightenment ideas about virtue, reason, and the state.

In each layer, someone is doing narrative work: selecting, blending, and elevating certain strands while downplaying others. The result is that what we call “Christian” at any given moment is less a pure transmission from Jesus or the apostles and more a palimpsest—Jesus over Paul, Paul over Hellenism, Hellenism over Rome, Rome over the Enlightenment, and all of it retroactively baptized as if it were one continuous, unbroken tradition.

Seen this way, religion doesn’t just look like one of humanity’s oldest professions in the sense of “people who speak for the gods.” It looks like the oldest narrative profession: the ongoing, contested craft of taking inherited stories, philosophical systems, and political projects and stitching them into something that feels timeless, inevitable, and sacred. Paul did it. Joseph Smith did it. The architects of America’s “Christian values” did it. And we’re still doing it every time we tell ourselves who we are and where our values come from.

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