Enda80

I haven't heard of too many people who do not believe in his prophethood admiring Paul. Is the consensus that he was even more childish than the Biblical Jesus?

Toto

Paul is a favorite villain in Christian history for modern people who think that Jesus was a good guy, and someone distorted his true message.

But I don't think that there is any consensus about who Paul really was.

We already have several Paul-bashing threads. Is there a particular topic you wanted to discuss?

Dharma

hunh? I thought Paul was considered a good guy in modern religous circles who brought Christianity to everyone with his distortion of the meaning of Christ and allowing gentiles into the sect? You can never win, who knows what they will believe next...
:huh:

So what's the consensus amongst historians/religious people? Wasn't it Pauline interpretation that started the mass conversions of people into Christianity, which was simply a small Jewish sect, and the basis of the first church?

Toto

There is no consensus.

Christians like the fact that Paul opened the religion to people who rejected circumcision and the Jewish dietary rules, but they don't like some of the sexist things that Paul said about women not speaking in church, slaves obeying their masters, etc.

Crucifiction

Why would I admire a sexist bigot; even if he DID write all of the books attributed him?

Anat

There were Jews who liked Paul for diverting the major missionary activity from them to the Gentiles.

Laurentius

Without Paul, the Christian ideology wouldn't have appealed to Romans and eventually conquered Europe.

Chris Weimer

But Paul most certainly didn't write the Pastorals... I think the only Epistles truly by the author Paul was Romans, Corinthians A, Corinthians B, and Galatians, though I'm still undecided about Phillipians, Philemon, Thessalonians A, and Ephesians. But the Pastorals, Collossians, and Thessalonians B are a sure thing for forgery.

Dharma

I read that the church banned the reading of the Bible by non-clergy for 1000 years. The Bible was not even read by most European converts for 1000 years as it was only to be read by the clergy and punishment was by death...so you can thank Paul for hustling Rome into Christianity which forced the rest of Europe into a religion who's God thought gentiles were no better than dogs and the Jews who didn't believe in him, devils...

so after 1000 years thanks to the Romans, Christianity became ingrained culturally in Europe, whether Europeans liked it or not.

Perhaps the question should be not whether or not anyone admired Paul, but whether or not Romans (whose emperors slept with their own mothers and sisters ) should be allowed within 10 feet of any religion? They not only made pagans look bad, they totally screwed up with Christianity.

Laurentius

Hey, are you for real?


Spreading is one thing. Becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire is another.

Pick a history book and see how long it took the Christian church before its officials had the power to impose anything in Europe.