gurugeorge

The trouble is, you're looking at "the evidence" like it's all one big bundle of evidence about the same thing.

But if you look at the evidence sequentially, you don't yet know that it's about the same thing. It's being-about-the-same-thingness might be a later construct of tradition, and itself mistaken (for all you know).

When you look at "Paul", the gospels haven't been written yet (maybe some bits had been put down in writing, but even orthodox biblical scholarship isn't really sure about this - I mean from the internal evidence, the archaeology, the philology alone).

i.e., we don't yet know from any supposed sibling "James" in the gospels, so we can't allow ourselves the privilege of immediately jumping to that conclusion, making that link. If you just look at "Paul" as "Paul", the evidence, the actual evidence staring you in the face, is that, in using a phrase which, elsewhere in his writings, denotes some sort of community status, he's basically just saying, in parenthesis "I mean the James who is of X status in our community (as opposed to James the Street-Sweeper over here, or James the Scribe over there)" .

I guess my shaving technique is different from yours

dog-on

I don't see it that way.

I do believe that, around the mid to late second century, that the Pauline epistles were edited, that the Pastorals were written, that "Luke" was edited and that Acts was written.

gurugeorge

But think about it aa - what would be the purpose of putting this "Paul", this proto-gnostic, this "apostle of the heretics", in such a prominent place in the canon?

The propaganda of these people is that they can trace their lineage back to people who knew Jesus Christ personally, as disciples (e.g. "Peter"). Why on earth would they feel they had to even include such writings as "Paul", who claimed only after-the-fact, visionary experience of Jesus - far less make them up at a fairly late stage (as I think you've said)?

It really doesn't make sense - it's like shooting yourself in the foot.

If you're going to promote a fraudulent history, and you're already perpetrating the fraud that your bishops can trace lineage back to people who knew Jesus personally, why muddy the waters by making up another lineage that's based only on visionary experience?

Transient

By including Paul's stuff they avoided alienating a large group of people. It's all about making deals etc. If you think that Paul embarrasses christians then take the idea to tweb and see if any christians there think that the inclusion of Paul's stuff embarrasses them.
The people who included it were stitching up a religion under orders and did the best they could - and a mighty fine job they did too - just look how many people today still believe that tripe
To an outsider Paul looks like a misfit but when you're on the inside it's all good. God's got it all covered. The people who framed christianity and the cannon were only dealing with insiders - the rest got expelled outside the empire - not a lot of fun out there.

ApostateAbe

I shave by choosing the explanation that is the most unified, that doesn't require as many extra explanations or stretches in probability to have a consistent sensible model. That is what Occam's Razor is about. That is why I used the word, "unified," as a term of support--when many pieces of evidence fit together in favor of one model, then that is an advantage for the model. So the matching of the names from the gospels with the names in Paul's letters, Peter (Cephas) and James, "the brother of the Lord," is explained by Jesus having close associations with both of those individuals. That is the HJ model. With the MJ model, you have to explain "James" one way and "Peter" a different way, neither explanation relating to the other, and neither explanation having enough evidence.

Yes, the synoptic gospels were not written until well after the letters from Paul, but the synoptic gospels apparently contain plenty of information that was reputed among Christians by word of mouth. Many of those things are apparently only myths, such as the miracles. But many other pieces of information are correct, corroborated by Philo of Alexandria and Josephus, such as the rulership of Pontius Pilate, the Passover, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the temple of Jerusalem, the valley of Hinnom, the Jewish religion and laws, and so on. Given that the synoptic gospels were written by Greek speakers, not Jews, this sort of accuracy to history should not be overlooked. If the gospels got those things correct, then we may expect that they got the family and disciples of Jesus correct. And apparently they did, given the mentions by Paul.

aa5874

And who WERE these heretics of whom Paul would be an apostle? Can you name the heretics BEFORE Paul? Based on the NT, Paul was a contemporary of Jesus and became an apostle of Jesus after ascension.

What heretics existed after Jesus ascended to heaven so that Paul could be their apostle?

The Pauline writings were supposedly used to counter Marcion. It makes no sense to use writings from a well-known heretic, mutilate them and turn around and used them against Marcion.

If all the writings of Paul were heretical for at least 100 years before Marcion and circulated as heretical and the Pauline heresy was taught all over the Roman Empire by Paul himself, then it would have been known that the Church writers were the ones who mutilated the writings of the Paul the heretic.

The populace would have already known that Paul was a well-established heretic and would likely have Paul's heretical writings in their possession.

The history of the Church was supposedly written in the 4th century, that is when Acts of the Apostles and the Pauline Epistles were needed.

Eusebius claimed he would write the history of the Church from the time of Jesus to his present time, without Acts of the Apostles and the Pauline writing there would have been a massive hole.

Justin Martyr, Theophilus of Antioch, Athenagoras, Municius Felix, the authors of gMatthew, gMark, gLuke, gJohn and Revelation did not use Acts of the Apostles or the Pauline writings.

Acts of the Apostles and the Pauline Epistles provided the POST-ASCENSION historical foundation of the history of the Church where Paul meets Peter and gets revelations from Peter's Jesus.

The Church writers attempted to use Marcion as a supposed witness that these writings were in existence during the 2nd century. The Church writers attempted to use Marcion as an external corroborative source.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Based on Justin Martyr, during the 2nd century, there were the Memoirs of the Apostles, The Acts of Pilate, and Revelation, there is no indication that there was an heretic called Paul, of that there was an apostle of heretics who wrote Epistles of his heretical teachings to churches all over the Roman Empire.

And when Justin Martyr wrote about his conversion, he did NOT write about being a Pauline student, nor read his Epistles, Nor talked about Paul's lightning bolt conversion.

When the authors of the Gospels wrote their stories about Jesus they did not use critical information found in Acts of the Apostles and the Pauline writings. Even Jesus in the Gospels was circumcised, and did not teach his disciples that circumcision was useless, but Paul taught circumcision was of no value.

In the Gospels, Jesus did not teach the disciples that they would speak in tongues an become multi-lingual, but Paul claimed he spoke in tongues.

Paul claimed he and over 500 people saw Jesus in a resurrected state, but the author of Matthew claimed it was rumored that the disciples stole the body of Jesus implying that no-one saw Jesus alive again after he was buried.

Jesus claimed that there would be some from his generation who would witness his second coming, but Paul only claimed Jesus would come like a thief in the night.

Paul knows the reason for the resurrection of Jesus, however Jesus in the Gospel did not teach his disciples the reason for the resurrection.

The evidence indicates that the Pauline writings are all late. The Pauline Jesus is detailed, the gospel Jesus is crude.

If the Pauline writings were available before the Gospel writers then their Jesus, too, would have been far more refined and would have emulated Paul's Jesus, instead the Gospel writers relied almost entirely on Hebrew Scripture to manufacture their Jesus.

ApostateAbe

gurugeorge, I tried reasoning with aa5874 many times before, I called it quits long ago, and he hasn't changed a bit since. I think you may want to resign the effort yourself.

gurugeorge

For sure, I agree with a lot of what you say, but the point of interest to me is that this "smoking gun" (along with the revelealing whines by the early orthodoxy, in their own writings, that they often found heresy already established wherever they went - as noticed by Walter Bauer) seems to suggest that the original form of Christianity was mystical, visionary, etc. - basically already something like what later became Gnosticism - and was kick-started into a (very minor at that time) international cult by a visionary and mystic ("Paul" - I think his real name might have been Simon), and this lends support to the idea that there was no verifiably human, actually historical Jesus at the beginning of the whole thing at all.

This much we can be reasonably sure of: the first Christians seem to have believed that there was a divine Jesus entity who had recently descended to earth and been crucified, and somehow won a great spiritual victory in doing so.

But they didn't necessarily believe it because he's somebody they knew personally in the flesh, and were disciples of - at least there's no evidence of that in the earliest writings (the famous "silence" in the early writings).

Given that there's no evidence they knew someone personally, the simplest explanation is that they believed it because they thought they saw traces of his obscure advent and obscure (yet portentous) spiritual victory prophesied in Scripture ("according to Scripture" in 1Corinthians 1:15), and he was (probably with the Jerusalem people, certainly with "Paul") somebody they met and spoke to in their visionary excursions ("saw", in the same passage of Corinthians meaning "had a divine revelation of", which is apparently how that word is used elsewhere in the Septuagint, in connection with the self-revelation of the divine, in Scripture and visionary experience).

gurugeorge

I thought it was about not inventing unnecessary entities to explain things?

And that is inventing an unnecessary entity to explain things - and also, it's not taking the writings we have in the chronological order that philological investigation reveals them to have, and seeing what each has to say for itself, in sequence.

And also, again, as I see it, you're not looking at the broader context of the general pattern of religion: "X has a vision in which deity/spirit/demon Y gives him a "message", and he brings it back to the world". That seems to be the origin of nearly every religion, in a nutshell, with very few exceptions (in actual fact, I can't think of any exceptions offhand, except maybe Jainism and Buddhism - but they are properly speaking more like philosophies , in the ancient sense, but even philosophies in the ancient sense weren't entirely unconnected with visions, e.g. cf. Parmenides' proem, Buddha's encounter with Mara, etc., etc.). That should be the general background context of any investigation into Christian origins.

Now hang on a minute, let's get right down to brass tacks. What's the fundamental thing we're doing here, as rational investigators? We have a bunch of scribblings that we're trying to account for the origins of. It's no part of obedience to Ockham's maxim that we must take for granted the overt links between these characters spoken of in the scribblings. We don't honour Ockham by simply assuming that the characters even existed. Any links, or any actual historical existences have yet to be established - all we've got is scribblings about purported entities that might or might not have existed, that might be historical OR fictional OR mythical (or a bit of each).

In the aboutness of the scribblings, sure, the parts fit together: but unless we dig deeper, we have no way of knowing, as rational investigators, whether this fit is contrived or evidential or whatever it may be.

IOW, we have to look at mentions of "James" and "Peter" in "Paul" as they stand, first of all, without contaminating our investigation YET with anything from the gospels. We might find it's all hunky dory and all hangs together when we subsequently collate them with the gospels, but we might not. We can't just take it for granted that the whole set of scribblings is of a piece. It's ok for a religious tradition to do that, but we're supposed to be digging deeper and checking out the validity of such traditions in the first place, are we not? We're after what really happened, not what traditions assume happened: our investigation will (or won't) validate the traditions, not the other way round (we don't validate our investigation by accepting the tradition).

How the hell do we know that? It's quite a stretch, to arrive at your claim, from the thin basis of a few mentions of things vaguely reminiscent of gospels in relatively late (e.g. early 2nd century) writers, being current in the community then.

As has been pointed out by some writers IIRC, even some standard ones, this "getting right" of some genuine historical facts might just be because the scribblers got their information from Josephus and Philo! We can't just assume it's because the scribblers had independent access to the same facts that J and P had access to, via "oral tradition" or whatnot.

aa5874

But, can you name an early writing that, before Paul or at the time of Paul, suggests that the original form of Christianity was fundamentally mystical, or visionary?

Which early writing, before or at the time of Paul, suggested that there were early heresies about Jesus?

There CANNOT be heresy without orthodoxy.

When was mystical or visionary Christianity orthodox?

And how can it be that an unknown writer, if it is assumed gMark was the first Gospel, wrote a biography of Jesus where he was on earth, and crucified on earth, and all the other canonised Gospel writers appear to have used gMark's geography and biography, and virtually nothing from Paul who supposedly traveled all over the Roman Empire preaching, teaching, establishing churches and writing letters to his converts?

The Church canonised Acts of the Apostles and in that book Paul's Jesus is no different to Mark's Jesus. Both were betrayed in the night, crucified, resurrected and ascended to heaven.

These are the words of Paul according to the author of Acts 13.26-30

And the Pauline writer claimed he persecuted the faith that he NOW preached.

Paul could only get revelations from Jesus since the God/man had already ascended to heaven, not because his Jesus was only heavenly.