robto

Why would Marcion, or anyone else, fabricate letters from someone no one had ever heard of? It seems to me the existence of the letters, fabricated or not, are the best evidence for Paul's existence.

yalla

Have a look at the [Christian] apocrypha and legendary material.
There are lots of letters conventionally acknowledged to be forgeries.
That's why they are in there.
Such as the Gospel of Peter. A letter to the Virgin Mary, I think she replied. Seneca to Paul and back again several times.
A letter by Jesus himself, [it's in Eusebius if you want to read it].
No question forgeries occurred
.
Here is a link to a writer who states why the letters of Ignatius are "entirely spurious". I'm not sure if he is right but the POV is worth considering at least.
http://www.fullbooks.com/The-Ignatia...-Spurious.html

Was there a twin [note "twin"] brother of JC called Didymus Thomas?
There is an gospel allegedly written by him.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying someone somewhere did not write a stack of epistles with the name Paul attached. Probably a bloke named Paul in some cases IMO. [And if not it may not be highly relevant.]
But that, by itself alone does not make them genuine in that all or most contained therein is genuine fact.
And the genuineness of the Pauline epistles is strongly debated still with some reputable scholars claiming that there are few, if any, that were written by the person that is presented as such, in the time claimed, who did what was claimed therein.
That is, they claim they were written much later. By unknown authors for various reasons.
I've seen statements that the no. of genuine letters of Paul is 13, 7, 4, zero and in between.


Journal of Higher Criticism updated link
This link is to the Journal of Higher Criticism which has articles that question the genuineness of lots of things including the genuineness of the Pauline epistles.

One of the fascinations of the study of Christianity, for me anyway, is the major ambiguities and lack of solid fact and knowledge about just about everything.
cheers
yalla

Chris Weimer

yalla - the question asked why anyone would fake letters that no one had ever heard of. All the examples you gave listed people already from tradition.

The thread is, after all, talking about a mythical Paul, i.e. one totally fabricated, not merely a mythic Paul, i.e. with fabricated legends attached. The latter is obvious, the former absurd.

pharoah

It's not necessary to assume that Paul was unknown or a mythical figure to believe that Marcion fabricated letters in his name. What if Paul really lived and established churches throughout Asia Minor, but didn't write anything, like most of his other contemporaries? He would still be a well-known figure that others would find useful as a shield for their views.

NOTE: I'm not claiming that Marcion did fabricate the Pauline letters, merely pointing out that robto's line of reasoning is a bit of a strawman.

yalla

Gidday Chris,
But....
If, IMO a very big if but still worth considering, some of the Dutch Radicals are right, in that ALL of the Pauline epistles are forgeries from a later date, then "Paul" is essentially a ficticious character, one totally fabricated.
The forger[s] created the tradition.
Similarly, Killen would regard Ignatius as ficticious or totally legendary or mythical [using the term loosely I know].
In other words nobody would have heard of these characters, nor the traditions associated with them, if they had not had letters forged [in that they purport to be set in a different time etc] and these names attached.
cheers
yalla

yalla

Gidday Chris again,
To elaborate a bit on my previous post.
I think part of the problem is that we view all of christian writings etc through a mist of a powerful pervasive mind set created by nearly 2000 years of dogma, doctrine, myth and culture.
Well before I read anything at all on this topic I was aware of Paul and his epistles and a stack of other stuff [gospels, Revelation, 666 and all that]. Its in the water we drink and the air we breath of western culture so to speak.
Rembrandt, Handel, Milton,......Xmas decorations and holydays, you know what I mean.
So for example when I read the Dutch Radicals my immediate impression was that they were a bit "way out", fringe, extremists. Which is probably accurate but not necessarily a reflection on their validity. There are after all powerful forces that would want to marginalise their thoughts.As in the case of Strauss [sp?].
And, of course, Paul existed, didn't he?
Well no, not according to them [or at least some of them in part or whole].
If their analysis is correct then Paul is the creation of a forger from a later time. And that person[s] is not the Paul as presented in the "Pauline 'epistles.

And remember, for a long time Ignatius was considered to be "mythical' in that all his writings were considered to be forgeries from a later date. He and his alleged writings were fiction.
It was not until Ussher [?] rehabilated him by pruning away the obvious forgeries from the genuine real McCoy [that which was left] that Iggy was considered a real person once again.
But Killen, for one, was not convinced.
So that which is perceived as genuine or myth can come and go as the fortunes of Iggy show and, who knows, maybe Paul will suffer the same fate in reverse?
We can't take anything for granted and we have to try and penetrate the fog of cultural blinkers to criticise skeptically all we come across.
cheers
yalla

spin

It would have been easier for anti-Marcionites to simply reject the letters as irrelevant to the cult. Instead, Acts makes the effort to bend Paul around and accommodate him. (And Acts is a book which is a composite tradition in itself which has different sources which deal with Paul. Acts isn't historical, but its acceptance of Paul is straightforward.)


spin

jakejonesiv

The letters were attributed to a legendary figure, one who fought wild beasties.

If after the manner of men I have fought with wild beasts at Ephesus, what does it profit me? 1 Cor. 15:32.

They departed from Crete and came to Asia: and at Ephesus twelve thousand believed at the teaching of the holy Paul: there also he fought with beasts, being thrown to a lion. _Acts of Paul_ VIII

See The Falsified Paul: Early Christianity in the Twilight Hermann Detering

Jake Jones IV

joedad

I’ve only recently come to understand the HJ position, namely how a Gospel Jesus - or Paul - can be fictional and historical at the same time. I can understand how fictional accounts can be invented about actual people, but if all we have is obvious sensationalized fiction, just because actual people exist hardly seems justification to historicize said literary characters.

My brain just equates myth with hoax. Piltdown was a hoax based on a myth. Piltdown’s believability was sustained only by a popular untruth.

ynquirer

There is a strong argument that Paul ever existed and that he wrote most of the epistles that bear his name. If it were a bio of Jesus, that would be different; but he wrote letters to concrete communities of Christians throughout the Mediterranean – Romans, Corintians, Galatians... Either the Christians’ intelligence is valued at a discount, so that they are deemed to have been candid people that believed every stuff their competing leaders wished to give them, or the disclosing of epistles purported to have been written to the Romans, for instance, of which the Romans had never heard, would have caused a bit of a scandal; and not only in one local community, but in many of them at the same time. Although there is evidence of several disagreements within the church, not any speaks of such a scandal.

I know mine is argument from silence. Yet it seems that no one of us, whichever their side, has anything else than arguments from silence. However, the argument that many local communities could have accepted without serious opposition the epistles as authentic entails an assumption that, in my opinion, is not fair. The assumption is that, just as the Christians accepted so unbelievable story as the resurrection of Christ, they must have accepted any story, however unbelievable.

To believe that Paul fought with wild beats in Ephesus is one type of belief, and for the Ephesian Christians to believe that Paul wrote a letter which they never received, is quite a different one. The former may be metaphoric – what beasts were those? The latter cannot be but factual. Perhaps the letter the Ephesians received had not been written by Paul himself – perhaps he told one of his assistants to write it, or else someone wrote it just before news of Paul’s death had spread. But there should have been a letter that the olders remembered – we are talking of things that happened within the first hundred years of the Christian church.