Duvduv

What's complicated here? He wasn't known in the place he was persecuting......churches? "the Church"?

how intensely I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it 21 Then I went to Syria and Cilicia. 22 I was personally unknown to the churches of Judea that are in Christ. 23 They only heard the report: “The man who formerly persecuted us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy.” 24 And they praised God because of me.

LegionOnomaMoi

It's not an issue of complication, but of inference. For example:
How can you possibly have any idea about the "flow" of a sentence you can't read?

Or again:
The word used which you translate as "church" was around hundreds of years before the first century CE. So I suppose the use of the word by Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, etc., were also all interpolations.

That's not what he says:
"Personally unknown"? That's how you translate to prosopo? Not 'by sight" or "by face" which is what it actually means? Hence:
They knew of him, but did not know what he looked like. How else do you explain προσώπῳ?

Duvduv

In other words he was in Jerusalem persecuting the Christians but the victims never saw him. They only heard of him..persecuting "The church of God" who is "us"........unknown to the churches of Judea.....What do they want to say? That he wore a mask?

LegionOnomaMoi

No, in other words you are positing interpolations because of the "flow" of sentences you can't read, making claims based off of your interpretation of words (church, churches) which aren't in the text, and the entirety of your initial post is just a series of speculations dependent upon not only a misunderstanding of context, but an inability to actually read the words you are using to string together into a series of illogical conclusions.

Interpolation because of the use of the word "church." Only there is no word church.

Interpolation because of the "flow" of an english translation of a sentence you can't read.

The use of the word "christians" despite the fact that Paul never uses the term.

And now this: "In other words he was in Jerusalem persecuting the Christians"

Only he never says he was in Jerusalem persecuting Christians.

mountainman

This implication was not required in the 4th century, when the forged correspondence between Paul and Seneca was in official orthodox christian circulation.

Solo

You may be onto something there: we know that Acts was widely resented in the later church, as the idea of Christian church being consecrated and hosted in Jerusalem clashed with the growing anti-Jewish sentiment. Eusebius provides us with a much abridged version of the church existence in Jerusalem, which begins not with the event at Pentecost but the event of the ordination of the seven deacons and Stephen appointment to administer church finances. (HE 2.1) It was followed next by the martyrdom of Stephen and persecution of the church by the Jews in which strangely everyone was expelled from Jerusalem but the ringleaders.

The 'great persecution' was a formula by which Acts sought to explain the establishment of Christian communities in the diaspora, a formula which at once confirmed and denied the Jewish origins of the new faith. It needed to confirm the Jewish origins because Eusebius church saw itself the legitimate successor of the Jewish faith (with which it competed for converts). It denied (or minimized) the dependence on Jewish communities because most (or perhaps, all) of the earliest proto-Christian groups originated in Diaspora which had little or no connection to the messianist movement in Jerusalem.

As Paul's apostolic career by his own witness clearly originated outside Palestine, a narrative had to be found to connect him to the Jerusalem messianists and make him derive his own theology from artifacts and early liturgy of an existing church, i.e. one which already at Paul's time thought of himself as a separate entity and which shared the vision of Jesus as messiah. Hence the parallel of Paul with king Saul, the one-time persecutor of David, who was dramatically converted.

Best,
Jiri

spin

As Legion points out ekklhsia has been around a lot longer than christianity. This leads us to an important issue: you cannot trust your understandings of any overtly christian term found in Paul's writings. He is writing at the dawn of christianity, so the terms he uses were either not christian at all or else he is using them in new ways that become the standard. Trusting your understanding of his use of "church" will not help you.

Side issue of note: the significance of "church" for Paul seems to be similar to its use in LXX Deuteronomy, a meeting, a congregation, that can happen in someone's house. He talks about the church in Corinth (one church) and the churches in Judea. However, in Gal 1, we find "the church of god" (singular), not referring to any particular congregation, but apparently the whole body of believers. This is extremely fishy. He talks about the "church of god" in 1 Cor, but that can be taken as the particular church at Corinth. There is an exception though, in 1 Cor 15:9, a section that I have in this forum argued for other reasons is an interpolation. In both cases is the notion of persecuting the church of god. I'm highly suspicious of this line about the church of god. It doesn't reflect the understanding we have of Paul's notion of "church".

stephan huller

The marcionite text of galatians began near the end of chapter 2. everything before that is probably bullshit

spin

The people in the churches of Judea in christ, ie the messianic assemblies or meetings in Judea, didn't know Paul by face, suggests that he was known through his activities in the diaspora, so people in Judea had heard about him through people that they knew in the diaspora, but had never met him.

There is no way of knowing the beliefs of those messianic assemblies, in that we don't even know if they knew anything about Jesus and Paul doesn't enlighten us. We never learn the beliefs of the pillars in Jerusalem. Did they believe in Jesus or something else, such as the messianism of John the Baptist? Paul always contrasts Jesus with Jewish praxis in Galatians: salvation comes through Jesus, not doing the law. His criticism of Peter is of a person who can't follow the law unless bullied into it, but he is supposed to follow the law. Does this sound like a person who had direct experience of Jesus and the replacement of the law? Clearly not. I think this Peter is Ur-Peter before he has become christianized. How come it's Paul flogging the Jesus message and not Peter and the rest of them?

There are a lot of fish in the place and they stink.

spin

That's fourlegsgoodism.