aa5874

You see, your position is based on whatever you want to believe without any support or corroboration. You see inventions about Paul yet you just ignore them and think you know what is true.

Now why would you say "Paul" got the whole thing started when you know "Paul's conversion from the very start is just incredible.

You claim the Epistles have a powerful "voice" but what is really powerful about making delusional claims about Jesus was risen from the dead and that he is coming back for dead people?

It is plain to see that "Paul" was already aware of the Jesus stories, that is the reason he comes across as a visionary. The author of the Epistles appear to be aware of the Gospel of Luke and invented his revelations using the Jesus stories.

aa5874

The author of the Epistles got information from gLuke, not revelations, not from Jesus.

gurugeorge

I'm not ignoring them at all. I have a different way of cutting the invention cake, such that what seems to be the case is that Acts is an invention that's partly based on a real person and the Epistles are Orthodox elaborations of some writings of a real person who kick-started the religion (in terms of spreading it to the gentiles). (I've put my potted sketch elsewhere, where I have more reference to anchors in scholarship, but basically I'm following Dutch Radical scholarship and some suggestions of Robert Price, in taking the person behind "Paul" to have been a Samaritan proto-Gnostic mystic who, in Acts, was split into two for "political" reasons - into a bad version, "Simon Magus" and a good version, "Paul".)

But take the quote you quoted elsewhere, about "Paul" getting his revelation direct from the horse's mouth - is that a fabrication? To me, it looks like the conversion story is a way of squaring an orthodox requirement - that this "Paul" be Jewish - with what must have been general knowledge at the time, and is admitted in his own writings, which is that the real "Paul" had visionary experiences of the cult figure.

"Paul" is so lumpy in terms of orthodoxy, he doesn't really fit into the whole "Apostles" story; there would have been no logic to inventing him out of whole cloth. More likely, is that he was a real figure, but orthodoxy had to make him conform to their preferred view of the origins of the movement.

aa5874

The Epistles were written by a real person who appeared to have lived after gLuke was written. The author of 1 Corinthians claimed Jesus revealed to him passages found in gLuke and gLuke has been deduced to have been written at least late 1st century or beyond.
Now, if Simon Magus lived during Claudius, then I do not think he was the author of 1 Corinthians and there is no information external of apologetics that can corroborate that Simon Magus was aware of the Jesus stories.

Again, you are just inventing scenarios to support a priori outcome.

Who knew "Paul" was Jewish? What visionary experiences did "Paul" really have? What "Apostle" story did not fit "Paul"?

Now, Paul's conversion was invented from whole cloth, Paul's basis for his ministry was invented. Paul is in effect an invention from whole cloth, without this fabricated conversion, Paul would be irrelevant.

The logical reason to invent "Paul" is to try to establish a history of the Church which after reading Church History by Eusebius appears to be completey bogus.

It is known that Justin Martyr did not mention Paul or the Epistles, it is likely that the name Paul was attached to the Epistles after Justin Martyr.

Helpmabob

Jesus was Paul's Saviour and Lord because God willed it and established it So his teachings have endured over the years.

aa5874

No way.

Constantine and Eusebius saved them, that is, Jesus and Paul.

gurugeorge

That's like saying the Matthew-like bits in Justin Martyr show he knew Matthew. It's possible, but not a necessary conclusion - just as likely is that there were bits and pieces of either written or oral lore floating about before then that were subsequently composed into GLuke (or GMatthew for that matter).

If you're going to invent stuff, why invent the person who spread Christianity the most in the early days as being someone whose basis was visionary experience at all? It doesn't make sense, you might as well leave it with "Peter" and the other apostles who supposedly knew the Main Man in person.

To me this "lumpiness" in having to accommodate a visionary at the roots of Christianity (when this would not have been necessary if orthodoxy were fabricating a history de novo) exposes the raison d'etre of the "hard" historicization of Joshua Messiah - orthodoxy wanted to create for itself a lineage that was closer to the cult figure than the lineage of the actual founder ("Paul", whoever he was, "Paul" being merely a nickname like "Shorty" or "The Wee Yin"), whose lineage connection was purely visionary. So they came up with the notion (which is nowhere actually stated in Corinthians, but in view of the famous passage's ambiguity can be read from it) that the Jerusalem people knew Joshua Messiah personally and that orthodoxy's church, the Roman Catholic church, had a double lineage connection - via "Paul" like everyone else, but also back to the Main Man via "Peter" (another fabrication, a take-off of Cephas). But they couldn't distort "The Wee Yin's" writings too much, because they were reasonably widespread at the time.

aa5874

Not all. I did not claim Justin Martyr knew Matthew. Justin never mentioned any Gospel written by a person called Matthew.

I was very specific. I wrote that the author of the Epistle appeared to have lived after gLuke was written. And this is based on information found in Church History, gLuke, Acts of the Apostles coupled with the absence of the name Paul or the Epistles in Justin Martyr's writings.

The Church writers claimed Paul was aware of events in Acts of the Apostles, but it would appear Acts of the Apostles was written after gLuke, this augments my postion.

The author of the Epistles appeared to have lived after gLuke and Acts of the Apostles were written.

I do not use speculation about bits and pieces of unsupported imagination.

So, why did the author of Acts invent Paul's conversion story, he could have just said that Paul was one of the original 12 disciples?

If Paul was one of the original 12, he would NOT need revelations. Why would the author claim he had revelations when it was really implausible?

The NT does not make sense. Except when you realise it was fabricated to distort history.

gurugeorge

You can't just throw your hands up in the air when it doesn't start making sense to you lol. In fact it's right here where the plot thickens.

The point is a visionary at the root of christianity doesn't make sense as a fabrication.

Look: if you claim Paul is a fabrication (for whatever purposes, it doesn't matter) then I suggest to you that there would be no point whatsoever in fabricating him as a visionary and then having that whole palaver with Peter in Acts. It's just unnecesary complication.

This strongly suggests that there was a real visionary guy at the root of the history that the fabricators of Acts had to accommodate because he existed, and to have missed him out or to have made him not a visionary would have raised too much suspicion.

If there was, then I don't see any objection to provisionally accepting the Epistles as being mostly by this guy, and seeing how far we get on that assumption. i.e. see if the rest of the story coheres and fits with the other known facts, thin as they are. (Remember, absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence - your reliance on the absence of Paul in Justin doesn't give you a watertight case.)

You keep victoriously throwing your interpretations at me as if they're facts - it seems to me that there's very little in this field that's settled fact. Biblical scholarship is a speculative wonderland precisely because of the paucity of facts.

But since speculation is pretty much all we've got, then we might as well speculate based on principles of coherence and a canny understanding of human beings and the shennanigans they get up to.

My artistic "nose" tells me the Epistles are largely (though not wholly) the work of one man. They're too idiosyncratic to be made up for purpose (they would have been tighter and more on message if they had been). Couple that with the evidence we have from Ignatius and Justin Martyr that the concern of early orthodoxy was to unite a fragmented church already pullulating with what they considered to be "heretics", and it becomes (to me) obvious that what we're dealing with is an orthodox attempt to unite this fragmented church by fabricating (alongside its actual historical connection back to Paul), an extra, dual lineage via "Peter" back to the cult figure that trumps Paul's merely spiritual, visionary lineage - which they share with the churches they consider heretical.

IOW it's to "Peter" you should be looking for the real wholly invented character in Acts, not "Paul". "Paul" is not invented in acts but split into a "good guy" version and a "bad guy" version - one representing the orthodox dual lineage (Peter+Paul) the other representing the recalcitrant "heretics". "Peter" is just a take-off on Cephas (who again, was probably real, one of the very original founders of the Joshua Messiah meme, before Paul took it up), based on nothing other than a hokey name connection.

The joke is the only real lineage is Pauline, all the way through. All the gentile churches were from Paul originally. It's just that after the diaspora, some Romans and Diaspora Jews in Rome developed what was at first a Pauline proto-Gnostic church, like every other, into what became first proto-orthodoxy (Ignatius, Justin) and eventually orthodoxy ("Luke", Eusebius).

(Sorry aa the above may seem a bit windbaggy to you, just organising my thoughts a bit there.)

aa5874

But you still have not answered the questions.

If "Paul" was not an invention why did the author of Acts invent his conversion, even claiming "Paul" spoke to Jesus in heaven and was blinded to the point where "scales" were on his eyes?

If "Paul" was not invented why did the author called "Paul" invent a story about meeting Christ but could not recall exactly how he did?

If "Paul" was not invented, why did the author called "Paul" invent his story about revelations from a RISEN dead Jesus who told him about events that was written in gLuke and Acts of the Apostles?

If "Paul" was not invented, why did the author called Eusebius invent the death of "Paul"?

If the history of Paul is an invention, why is "Paul" not an invention?

Please, gather your thoughts.