Originally Posted by Elena

Do we have any evidence that there was an historical Paul? Is there any evidence outside christian literature?

Originally Posted by Elena

Do we have any evidence that there was an historical Paul? Is there any evidence outside christian literature?

Originally Posted by Toto

No, no evidence outside Christian literature.

The letters of Paul were written by someone, and most people accept that as evidence of a historical Paul.

There is the theory that the figure of Paul is a Christianized or otherwise cleaned up version of Simon Magus; there was a Jewish magician known as Simon who is mention in Josephus' Antiquities xx, 7, § 2 who might be the same person. Or not. :huh:

Originally Posted by DCHindley

I wouldn't go as far as to say they did these things to "create a false pre-70 CE history." Maybe it is more like the Mishna, which reflects the Rabbi's idealized picture of the practices and teachings of Judaism in the holy land before the final destruction.

On account of the rebellion of 66-73 CE, Judaism had changed from what it was before that destruction (no more sacrificial system or atonement for the unintentional sins of the people by the high priest on the new year) and they had developed alternative points of view to substitute for them, and these are reflected in their idealizations of how things wre "really" done in the good ol' days.

Similarly, these same events caused the Jesus movement to change from what it was in Jesus' day (full of apocalyptic anticipation of a just new kingdom of God ruling the world in place of the Romans), and in the process they asked themselves "How could God have failed to give us what he promised?"

They apparently decided that it wasn't God who got things wrong, but them. Even before the war, Jesus was thought to have been raised from the dead, a token resurrecton of all the righteous when the kingdom of God would come in power. When the Romans later utterly crushed any chance of that happening, though, they decided that Jesus' death wasn't really a failure at all, but instead was an atoning sacrifice that would replace the sacrifices in the temple and the atonement that used to be effected by the high priest each year.

The gentile wing took this even farther, creating the high Christology we see in the NT. Like the Rabbis, they saw their formation not as forced upon them by circumstances, but idealized it as part of a process that instituted a "new covenant" through Jesus' death and resurrection, and a change of guard from Jews (who got things all wrong by rebelling) to gentiles (who figured out what God "really" meant).

Originally Posted by bacht

Seems like a reasonable reconstruction. Do you accept that Paul or someone like him was part of the pre-66 scene, or would he be part of the post-135 gentile re-focusing of the Christian movement?

Originally Posted by Clivedurdle

And Hebrews then also fits - the new high priest in the heavens or people's hearts rather than in a physical place. There is no need to relate this to the destruction of the Temple as anyone living anywhere in the Greek world (maybe that is a good way to summarise Britain to China?) would have a real problem of having nowhere to sacrifice, so a once for all sacrifice is a reasonable solution.

Originally Posted by Judith Shulevitz

..... In my college days I thought Paul’s insight into the paradoxical nature of desire endowed early Christianity with a precocious depth. I thought that when Paul says, in Romans, “I had not known sin, but by the law; for I had not known lust, except the law had said, ‘Thou shalt not covet,’” he was grasping that what is forbidden is also acutely alive, called into being even as it’s placed out of reach. It would be close to a millennium before the rabbis would indulge in first-person self-revelation like that.

But according to the revisionists, this tormented Paul never existed. Or, if he did, he was no more than a useful fiction for people like Augustine, who needed someone to justify his own conversion and war against sin. For if Paul didn’t repudiate the Law, then Paul can’t be talking about his own difficulties with it. Nowhere other than in Romans does Paul call himself a failed Jew. Indeed, there are passages in which he brags about his excellence as a Pharisee.

So why does he speak in the first person? Revisionists say he’s employing a figure of Greek rhetoric called prosopopeia, which would have been familiar to his contemporaries but invisible to readers not trained in Hellenistic modes of discourse. That is, he’s pretending to be someone he’s not for the sake of argument. He’s imagining his way inside the head of a pagan who is, for the first time, trying to live within the Law, and discovering that under the Law, he’s actually a terrible sinner. How discouraging that would have been for him! How remote he would have felt from God!