chimaira

hello all

why the Gospels do not speak about Paul?

hatsoff

Quite simple: They covered a time period prior to Paul's involvement.

spamandham

The gospels end at roughly the resurrection. By his own admission, Paul was not part of that story.

rlogan

Great question, and the answer that "The Gospels End at the Resurrection" is insufficient.

It's pretty telling that none of the gospels speak to post-resurrection matters for anyone.

That is a hallmark of myth, not history. None of the disciples have any tangible statements such as "Peter, who went to run a brothel in Sumaria" or "Bill, who subsequently ran the church gambling in Reno..." they are just phony names inserted to give the appearance of history.

All of the legends about martyrdom and etc. sprouted up long after the gospels were supposedly written.

Your question is a dual one, really. Paul does not mention the gospels, and the gospels do not mention Paul. Modern scholars usually assign the alleged Paul as writing before the gospels. So that the gospels do not mention him in any way is pretty suspicious. Not even a whisper.

It is a sign of competing forces at work and that attempts to harmonize these came very late in the game.

Vorkosigan

How do you know the Gospels do not speak of Paul? Doesn't it strike you that the Gerasene Demoniac is a representation of Paul, who according to legend was struck by the Lord not far from that spot. And in the 19th century Volkmar(?) argued that Mark's Jesus was actually Paul. Mark is full of Paul, including shared citations, Pauline thinking....

Paul is present, I would argue, just not as a character.

Codec

In one sense he is, as the author of Acts is almost certainly the author of Luke, and Paul is present in Acts. Some people have speculated that Luke-Acts was originally one continuous work.

rlogan

Hi Vork

I'm not sure what you mean about the Gerasene Demoniac. They mythical Jesus casts out a legion of demons into a couple thousand pigs, resulting in the largest (but forgotten) animal husbandry lawsuit in ME history. I don't see Paul in there, but I'm willing to listen.

I thought Volkmar stressed the mining of the Hebrew Bible in composing the mythical Jesus.


Hi Codec. I'm permanent scrub team here due to extreme laziness, but "Luke" admits being a latecomer to the gospel scene and I don't see any gospels before the 2nd century myself to begin with. Acts is a botched fairy tale and harmonization attempt, I would think.

At any rate, neither of these posts really addresses the question. Paul is not in the gospels, and the reason for that is not that we can insert some allegorical Paul in there instead or that there is the same author to two books.

Instead, we have to deal with this directly. Why is Paul the apostle not written of in the Gosepels.

Because Paul is a legend that came in the second century via Marcion who had a theology different from what we understand as canon. It competed with another strand of proto-orthodox Christianity that ultimately won peddling the line-of-descent argument from Jesus to Peter the pumpkin eater popus magnus firstus.

Doug Shaver

Why should anyone expect them to?

It is perfectly reasonable to suppose that the gospel authors didn't mention Paul because they had no reason to mention him, in contast to the analogous argument for Paul's failure to say anything about Jesus besides that he died and was resurrected.

hatsoff

I don't find it suspicious at all. Obviously the Gospel authors knew of Paul; for as you say Paul was famous in the community long before the Gospels were written. The simple fact is that Paul was not the Christians' savior; Jesus was. Tales of the travels of various evangelists did eventually become important, but they never seem to have been on par with Gospel narratives.

Luke is a wonderful example of why an author might have stopped at the Resurrection: It was simply the climax of the story. It is no reason to suppose that the author was not attempting to write a real history. After all, Luke went on to write another book, chronicling the ministries of Peter and Paul. And then of course we have the question of why Luke, who was writing after their deaths, did not mention how they came to pass. The answer is the same: Such things were beyond the scope of his intent.

Johnny Skeptic

If that is true, there is no reason to suppose that the authors of some other religious books were not attempting to write a real history. Regarding history, the only history that makes any difference are the supposed supernatural events in the book of Luke. There is not sufficient evidence that the supernatural events that Luke claims actually happened. Anyone can easily write accurate secular history that takes place where they live. If Julius Caesar did not actually cross the Rubicon River, so what?, but if the supernatural events that the Bible claims are true, nothing could possibly be more important for humanity.

In another thread, you said the following:

Would you also say that it is disturbing that Luke does not provide sufficient evidence that his claims of supernatural events are true?