LogicandReason

So beyond secular references to "Christos" and his followers, do we have any real sense of which came first, the voice named Paul or the Gospels?

bacht

As gurugeorge says, Christ seems to appear as full-blown Son of God sometime in the early 1st C. The apostles spread the word (following John the Baptist?) that the end is near and the messiah is coming. If there were primitive epistles they would have been created from the mid-century onwards.

By the early 2nd C the gospel genre is invented and disseminated. The idea of an earthly Jesus takes over from the solely spiritual Christ. By the 140s Marcion forces the Romans to regularize their beliefs in contrast to his Paulinism and other gnostics using Christian ideas. It's possible that some or all of Paul's writings were created at this time.

The resulting Catholic teaching includes the Jewish scriptures and "authentic" apostolic writings which endorse the Incarnation doctrine, focus on the gentiles, and de-emphasize the apocalyptic message of the first generation.

This is just one possible reconstruction.

aa5874

Well, it is my duty to, at least, make you aware that it is really not certain when the letter writers wrote, and that it would appear the letter writers were not really known to the Church.


The death of the letter writer, Paul, is found in Church History by Eusebius. But, Eusebius, in the same book, implied that Acts of the Apostles was written while the letter writer was alive, however biblical scholars have deduced that Acts of the Apostles was probably written after the writings of Josephus, sometime after or around 92 CE.

Now, if Acts of the Apostles was written after the matrydom of Paul and Peter, it is inconceivable that the author of Acts would simply forget to mention the two most important martyrs in the history of the Church, yet that is exactly what appeared to have happened.

The NT, as presented, is just filled with bogus information to distort the true history of Jesus believers.


I hope you realise that the NT appears to represent a bogus chronology of history, that is the characters and events including Jesus and the letter writers appear to be fakes. The true history of the Jesus believers may never ever be known.

For example, Justin Martyr appear to know and did quote extensively from a document called the "memoirs of the apostles", the document seems to have disappear without a trace, it just vanished.

No other Church writer ever quoted from it except Justin, yet Justin claimed that the "memoirs of the apostles" were read every Sunday in the churches in the city and in the country.

Just 20 years after Justin, Irenaeus never once referred to or acknowledge the "memoirs of the apostles."

What happened to the memoirs of the apostles?

First Apology 67

LogicandReason

Great question. Maybe Irenaeus himself arbitrarily names the four "Gospels" or names then according to oral tradition.

Paul is quoted in 1 Clement (Clement of Rome) dated about 96 C.E. It is possible that Paul's letters were written later and included the same quotes from a common source...or the letters existed.

As to Acts not reporting the Martyrdoms of Peter and Paul, good point. I have always seen Acts as a unifying polemic that attempts to unite the church of Paul with that of Peter. I think the surviving theology is more imbued with Paul that the early Jesus movement in and around Jerusalem...how many survived 70 C.E. would be hard to prove.

aa5874

And maybe he did not name them based on oral tradition. Maybe they were named to distort the history of Jesus believers. And maybe it was not done arbitrarily but deliberately.

Now, maybe 1 Clement was really written after Justin Martyr. And which Paul did Clement refer to, the one in Timothy or 2Thessalonians?


I now see Acts as fiction written to fabricate a fraudulent history of fictitious characters including Jesus, the apostles and the letter writer called Paul.

LogicandReason

Why? How much worse can the truth be than a man crucified is the Messiah? Is there something there (other than obvious facts like virgins don't have kids and people are not seen after death) to hide?

Clivedurdle

From what perspective was Paul writing?

http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/gopher/oth...gels%20(Green)

LogicandReason

The link did not work.

As to the question, I would posit that he was writing from the perspective that he had a revealed salvation plan with a cosmic savior. He created the theology as he went along. He was mainly promoting Paul (as opposed to other itinerants). Once he establishes 'sin' as the cosmic opponent, he sends much of the rest of his time defining 'sin.' He never spends much time trying to 'prove' that Jesus Christ is Savior...he infers that in his writing.

Toto

fixed the link.

gurugeorge

I think "Paul". As a matter of general principle, I don't really see any reason to stray too far from biblical scholarship's findings. Although I do entertain other possibilities, like him being a fabrication as aa says, or as the Dutch Radicals said, I think that if there are as many proto-gnostic sounding passages in "Paul" as some say, then they wouldn't have been put in an orthodox document written afresh. It looks like they had to be there because (parts at least) of the letters were well known and loved, and they could only be hedged around with orthodox fenceposts, not obliterated entirely. Those proto-gnostic passages must have been in the original documents, whatever they were, whether letters, or a "memoir of an apostle", or whatever, and by whomever written. Whatever the case, they had to be kept in for some reason.

The key here is to see the growing fight between an already-established but disparate and scattered (and already mutating) movement that's pretty much mystical and proto-gnostic on the one hand, and a burgeoning and powerful tendency, probably centred in Rome and Alexandria, to unify the religion, on the other This latter, and later (post-Diaspora) development, just happens to be the part of the Christian movement that had a much more well-defined historical view of the cult figure than other parts of the movement, placing him in a more specific time and place, and with a more specific biography. I surmise that one of the important influences here is the idea of the exemplary Stoic biography (the idea that a biography should exemplify philosophical principles put into action). Roman Christians would probably have had a stronger Stoic philosophical influence on them, and as practical, clever men, moved by emotions but not of a very mystical temperament, they wanted more detail, they wanted more of a story, and they thought Stoic-like biographies would be the best "setting" for the teachings. I think it's maybe an early attempt by Justin Martyr's buddies to cook up something like this that he is referring to by the "memoirs of the apostles". I think already at that time the idea must have been brewing amongst the early orthodoxy, to reinvent the apostles as having been people who knew the cult figure personally (as opposed to the genuine apostles, who were the early Jerusalem crowd and "Paul" and maybe others, all of whom were believers in a crude, un-fleshed-out Jewish Mysteries/Messiah saviour figure). i.e. they were able to take advantage of a kind of ambuguity in "Paul's" re-affirmation of the creed in Corinthians, to make out that the Jerusalem crowd weren't just the founders of the Joshua Messiah idea, but they had known Joshua Messiah personally. I think that "Peter", the real fabrication in Acts, represents post-Diaspora Jewish Christians, who colluded with the Roman Christians to create this illusion of a lineage going back to the cult figure himself (through them of course - and who'd be any the wiser?).

And that's the hidden, political purpose of the "hardening" of the historical Joshua Messiah - in order to trump the lineages of those "heretical" (to the orthodox) but already entrenched churches descended from the merely visionary "Paul". Orthodoxy had a battle on its hands, to bring to heel the Christian movement as a whole, and this was its main weapon - the forging of a lineage to the cult figure, bypassing "Paul" (who was actually the real founder of the Roman church, just like most of the others - which is why they had to have him shake hands with "Peter" in Acts). It may even be Marcion who gave the proto-orthodoxy the idea of having a unified Canon. But I think they came up with the hokey lineage before that.

I think pre-Diaspora there would already have been some "folk" attempts, even by the proto-Gnostics, to "fill in" the cult figure's mythical biography, and maybe some basic storyline sketch and some wisdom sayings. It's conceivable that this mythico-biographical sketch influenced Marcion, who created what eventually became Luke at the hands of the same individual or team that wrote Acts. Roundabout the same time as Marcion, the same biographical sketch influenced "Mark" (I take the post-135 dating for Mark, following Detering; and obviously I'm going with the later-than-consensus 125-130 dating for Acts.).

Other things to consider: "Paul" was called "the Apostle of the heretics" by Tertullian. If anything is a "smoking gun", or a something revealing that a Church Father let slip, this is it. "Paul" was claimed as their founding apostle by some of the later, full-blown Gnostic churches; students of "Paul's" were claimed as the teachers of Marcion and of Valentinus. Luke was supposedly the favourite gospel of Gnostics.

I think the "hot spot" in time for the invention of what became Christianity as we know it is from the period of the Pastoral Epistles, Polycarp, and Justin Martyr - 120-150 CE, and the formation of the Canon (including most especially the record-setting-straight Acts) in response to Marcion. Before that, Christianity is a small, scattered, disparate movement already developing from proto-Gnosticism into sundry offshoots, some more philosophical, some more mystical, some more Jewish - and some, indeed, becoming what later became orthdox.