Duvduv

Anyone ascribing to any historical truth to a historical Paul must surely confront all the gaps in the tale, not the least of which are the gaps between the Saul/Paul of Acts and the Paul of the epistles. But there are more gaps that at the very least would have been the subject of "midrashic" type material, and yet even the apologists who BELIEVED in a HISTORICAL PAUL were never interested in any of this at all:

1) When did this great apostle of the Christ move from Tarsus to Jerusalem?

2) What were his parents' names, and did he have other relatives? Especially given the fact that he was chosen from his mother's womb.

3) Why is nothing known about his life prior to his becoming a police enforcer for the High Priest after a career of great promise as a potential Tannaic leader under R. Gamliel between the years 18 and 28 CE?

4) What did Paul know about Jesus during Jesus's lifetime, and when did he know it?

5) How did Paul come to be a student of R. Gamliel in the first place, and how and why did he come to become a persecutor of the alleged Christians?

6) Where were all the communities in Judea of Christians, and who and where were all the Christians who were persecuted by Paul aside from poor old Stephen?

7) Was Paul running a one-man freelance police organization, or was he the head or part of a larger unit?

8) How and why did he leave his rabbinical career for the life of a policeman, and what did he do between the time under R. Gamliel (or other rabbi according to the epistles) and when he became a policeman?

MrMacSon

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Paul is unknown outside the texts attributed to him, at least half of which have been widely disputed.

Several of the 'undisputed epistles' are currently disputed; and all were disputed by the Dutch Radicals.


Galatians 1 (NIV) is a little ambiguous - one could think there is reference to Paul also being raised from the dead, depending on grammar -

Quote:

1 Paul, an apostle—sent not from men nor by a man, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead— 2 and all the brothers and sisters[a] with me, http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/...+1&version=NIV

"Paul, an apostle — sent ... by Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him [Paul] from the dead" ??


the KJV is similar -


Other verses also refer to non-human origins -

Quote:

11 I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin. 12 I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.

Quote:

15 But when God, who set me apart from my mother’s womb and called me by his grace, was pleased 16 to reveal his Son in me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles, my immediate response was not to consult any human being. 17 I did not go up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was, but I went into Arabia.

Sounds like whoever wrote that bit got it from Arabia - the south or south-east
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outhouse

Paul's Judaism has always been in question by historians.

Much of what you claim assumes way to much.

DCHindley

Security Guard?

Duvduv

In a way it's really amazing that the church didn't put together some "midrash" on Paul to fill in the gaps of his life. None of the apologists seems to wonder about this at all.....

mountainman

Why do you suppose the letter exchange between "Paul" and Seneca was forged?




εὐδαιμονία | eudaimonia

wordy

Would that text be likely to come from our known Seneca
or is it more likely it is a Christian way to give "Paul" some status.

Duvduv

Right, but it doesn't fill in any of those biographical elements that someone must have been interested in if as an apologist he believed in a historical Paul.
None of the apologists showed the slightest interest in the life events of their Paul before his revelation despite the fact that he was "chosen" from the womb. Presumably they would have been interested in this great woman and her family.......but none were. Of course if all they were interested in was the establishment of the standard religious doctrine, then nothing beyond the NT would have been important. Especially since even the gospels say nothing significant about Jesus childhood or adult life either prior to his ministry (except for his bar mitzvah in the temple).

Duvduv

Leaving aside the life of "Paul" himself, the very "fact" of all those Christians in his time has no foundation anywhere. Of all those persecuted by Saul or his organization, there existed information about only one single person named Stephen, and any reader (i.e. literate elite individual) would have noticed this, whether in Acts or in Galatians.

WHERE were the persecuted Christians throughout Judea or anywhere else?
WHERE were the communities mentioned in Acts?!
WHO were their leaders?
Where did Ananias (Chananya) of Damascus get to be a Christian?
WHY did Saul take the name Paul (if both were the same individual)?

These questions did not bother a single literate reader or a single apologist or historian for whom these texts were intended to serve as the basis of a religion or who were the sources of information and philosophy under the auspices of the regime for others.

NOR DID A SINGLE apologist bother to inquire and clarify about evidence of the existence of alleged Christian communities established EVEN PRIOR to Paul in Ephesus, Corinth, Thessalonika or other places.

Onias

Duvduv,
Have you considered that Paul might be derived from 'Saulus" of whom Josephus wrote?