pinkvoy

I saw a documentary From Jesus to Christ recently, and there was a black guy associate professor of Pauline scholarship of Harvard early Christianity and New Testament studies. Don't know recall his name. What he said though was that Paul was deeply and personally invested in the persons he was writing to, and the list of names at the end of each letter, the salutations. He spoke of Paul and Jesus, stating Paul spent time with James, brother of Jesus, and Peter, and he obviously believed Paul had a historical Gospel Jesus in mind when he wrote his letters, as did his immediate audience. I recall Elaine Pagels and Pauline xx being on the show, as well as Dominic Crossan and Bart Ehrman, so this is not a Christian fundamentalist hagiography of Jesus. It's not produced by Pat Robertson and CBN.

It got me thinking though,

who are respected 'secular' Pauline scholars in the world, and what do they think of the claim that Paul had a purely spiritual Jesus in mind, not the flesh and blood Jesus of the Gospel, and that Acts is not a reliable source of information on the author of the undisputed Pauline epistles, that Paul's Jesus bears no resemblance to Gospel Jesus, that he regarded James as a spiritual brother, not a family brother, and that the early Christians Paul met, such as Cephas and Junia, saw Jesus as a purely spiritual revelatory figure, not a real person who was recently crucified under Pilate?


How do these top Pauline scholars account for the apparent reticence of Paul to speak of Jesus with historical details, and do they think Paul did not think Jesus had lived and died recently? Are Mythical Jesus readings of Paul, as well as their spin on the human sounding passages like born of a woman, born under the Law, something top Pauline scholars agree or disagree?

Do top Pauline scholars think some information about a historical Jesus can be extracted from Paul's undisputed letters, like being born of a woman, crucified, buried? What about interpolations in the undisputed letters? What about possibly authentic material of Paul in Acts or disputed Pauline writings? When Paul speaks of the gospel, could there be either an oral or written gospel that catalogs the life of historical Jesus to new converts, so Paul felt he could presume his audience would know of that?

Are Acts, the pseudo-Pauline epistles, pseudo-epigraphical works like the Acts of Paul and Thelca have historical information on Paul?

Toto

Frontline: From Jesus to Christ

First Christians

The black guy was Allen D. Callahan. He is not listed as a specialist on Paul.

There are relatively few secular Pauline scholars. There is no information about Paul outside of the Bible, so there is not a lot to work with. But I am waiting for Robert Price's upcoming book on Paul, The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul (or via: amazon.co.uk)

Everyone seems to admit that Paul never met Jesus, and communed with a spiritual Jesus.

There are only a few evangelical scholars who think that Acts is a reliable source of information on Paul

Pauline studies is a difficult area, because there is no reliable source for Paul, outside of his letters. Most of the scholars spend their time doing literary analysis of the letters. They focus on the theology of the letters, and avoid making any pronouncements on history.

Not really.

stephan huller

I don't think so. For what it's worth I think the apostle did meet Jesus and was especially close to him at his crucifixion otherwise his emphasis on being 'baptized into his death' makes no sense. There is also

Ω ἀνόητοι Γαλάται, τίς ὑμᾶς ἐβάσκανεν, οἷς κατʼ ὀφθαλμοὺς Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς προεγράφη ἐσταυρωμένος

O foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was clearly set forth crucified?

Jerome writes that “in certain manuscripts (in quibusdam codicibus)” of Origen’s writings he has the reading “who has bewitched you that you should not obey the truth?” So another variant reads:

O foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you that you should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was clearly set forth crucified?

I think the text has been corrupted because the original sense was that the apostle saw Jesus crucified. The question actually comes up against the Marcionite with Adamantius demanding he answer whether the Marcionites believe that Paul was present at the Passion. The text doesn't allow him to answer but I am sure that he was present there. How else could he have been thought to have written the gospel.

That the Catholics think otherwise - well - it helps explain why they accepted all this false information about him. They didn't know what he was talking about.

Doug Shaver

Almost nobody else has any trouble making sense of it.

What they have trouble making sense of is not anything Paul says, but all the stuff he doesn't say about the presumptive founder of his religion.

show_no_mercy

Wouldn't προεγραφη εσταυρωμενος imply some sort of previous writing about crucifixion? I don't know why it is translated as "set forth" or "portrayed".

bacht

This is the key question isn't it, whether Paul "saw" something in this world or in a vision/dream? Also, wouldn't Catholics have seized this as further support for Paul's authority? Luke is careful to separate Paul from the original witnesses until after the resurrection and ascension, and he's never mentioned by name in the canonical gospels.

stephan huller

Doug,

Yes people figured it all out. But only from the Catholic perspective. The Marcionite perspective is quite different. The Catholics divide the gospels into those which were written by people who saw Jesus (Matthew, John) and those who didn't (Mark, Luke). The Marcionites 'just happen' to be attached to the two gospels written essentially by 'unauthoritative' evangelists and are attached to the one 'apostle' who also never saw Jesus.

Coincidence?

Hardly.

Deliberately manipulated propaganda.

Certainly.

The whole scenario which is created by the Catholics is so ridiculous. It is obviously dysinformation. Just look at the claims about Marcion happening to pick 'Luke' as the gospel to 'corrupt' - even though it begins 'apparently' with the strongest Judaizing tendencies. As John Knox writes: "Marcion would surely not have tolerated this highly 'Jewish' section; but how wonderfully adapted it is to show the nature of Christianity as the true Judaism and thus to answer one of the major contentions of the Marcionites! And one cannot overlook the difficulty involved in the common supposition that Marcion deliberately selected a Gospel which began in so false and obnoxious a way."

It's not just Luke that is constructed in this manipulative way. It's the idea that the Marcionite happen to chose the one apostle who had no real authority. Yes, 'the Holy Spirit' could be a source of authority for SOME Christians. But the Marcionites? They are otherwise presented as such literalists, such dogmatists with an exactness about words and phrase and beliefs.

Can you imagine Judaism being founded on a Moses whose whole experience with God was invented in his imagination? The Israelites 'see' God with their eyes:

and they saw the God of Israel. Under his feet was something like a pavement made of sapphire, clear as the sky itself. [Ex. 24.10]

וַיִּרְאוּ, אֵת אֱלֹהֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל; וְתַחַת רַגְלָיו, כְּמַעֲשֵׂה לִבְנַת הַסַּפִּיר, וּכְעֶצֶם הַשָּׁמַיִם, לָטֹהַר

You can't have covenants based wholly on imaginary experiences. It only works for your enemies as a way of slighting them - like Maimonides's Mohammed 'the madman' (because of the mere visionary nature of his experience).

I think the claim stems out of the docetic beliefs of the Marcionites - i.e. only the Catholics saw the man Jesus. As such Peter's experience 'counts more' or was 'realer' or had more authority than Paul's.

Doug Shaver

If you mean the perspective of historically orthodox Christianity, I've read plenty of scholars who are perfectly capable of ignoring that perspective when they read the extant literature.

I don't think anybody suspects otherwise.

It would no doubt be very enlightening if we could see how everything looked from the Marcionite perspective. But the first thing to keep in mind is that just because they disagreed with orthodox Christians doesn't mean they were any closer to the truth in their notions about how Christianity got started. The second thing to keep in mind is that we know absolutely nothing about them except what their orthodox enemies said about them. So far as I'm aware, no document known to have been written by any Marcionite has survived, and I learned a long time ago not to trust anything that orthodox Christians say about people with whom they disagree.

I don't see what would make a coincidence improbable.

But if you think I believe the orthodox version of Christian origins, you are entirely mistaken. I don't think there is any factual history at all in any of the gospels or in the Acts of the Apostles.

You mean like a conspiracy?

stephan huller

One giant reason for believing the Marcionites over the Catholics - they develop all their arguments from the NT alone. The Catholics were making things up as they went along

A tradition solely rooted in documents from the apostolic period is probably apostolic.

A tradition rooted in whatever came into Irenaeus's imagination probably dates to the time of Irenaeus

Rick Sumner

This is an interesting claim. Would you happen to be able to discern any statistics to that effect?