aa5874

You present a most horrible logical fallacy.

If you consider that the Pastorals are forgeries then you have CONTRADICTED yourself.

If you accept that writings of antiquity have been INTEPOLATED then again you have badly contradicted yourself.

If you accept that the NT Contains Fiction then your are really wasting precious time with your absurdities.

It is so basic and need no real training to understand that any claim made in the Canon may be false.

Your arguments are some of the worse I have seen.

Now, some Paul claimed he SAW the resurrected Jesus and that he SAW the Lord's brother called Apostle James and stayed with the apostle Peter for 15 days.

When did these things happen??? Did THEY HAVE TO HAPPEN???

Grog

That argument clearly doesn't work against the argument that there are no authentic writings of a "Paul." The second statement is only an assertion. I think there are grounds to question Paul, I certainly entertain the possibility that all of what we call Paul is forged and consider that when I look at the evidence. I haven't accepted it, but I do think it is a possibility.

You often say that you have "no dogs in the race." It seems to me, though, you consistently come down on the side of the Jesus to Christ Hypothesis. I have not seen you be able to maintain a defense of that, but your approach to the evidence seems to make that presumption. I try to make sense of the evidence from that perspective and it just fails to me. I have stated my reasons for that many times. I do not think you can wedge the "authentic" writings of Paul into that period between the death of Jesus Christ at the hands of Pilate and the emergence of the Gospels. Paul does not fit the evidence.

I said this on the Hoffmann blog because it is frustrating that Hoffmann continually expresses skepticism (though now he says he is mostly in the historicist camp) but offers no hypothesis for how Christianity came to be. What I said is that skepticism without a theory is crankism. Now, I'm not saying one should become set on a theory and not be moved by better arguments, new evidence, new and improved insights. We all should be skeptics. But if you are going to maintain a Jesus to Christ Hypothesis, then you have many holes to defend, the greatest, as acknowledged in the scholarly literature, is that Paul's writings do not fit what the hypothesis would predict. what we have in the literature, are ad hoc arguments to explain this problem (Paul is not interested in Jesus the man, Paul has no reason to reference the teachings of the man Jesus, etc). The proposition that "Paul was not interested in the man Jesus" is no more probable than the proposition that "Paul did not view Jesus as a man who recently lived on Earth." I think the evidence in the "authentic" letters of Paul completely makes sense if one reads them from the perspective that Paul did not view Jesus as a man who recently lived on Earth. The reverse is not true, there are many more problems when we read Paul from the perspective that Jesus really lived and died in the early first century, but Paul has little interest in or occasion to reference Paul. I have not seen that you have been willing to consider this viewpoint. Your explanation are ad hoc.

James The Least

Why make a myth about a Jew who is a crucified?

It's effective church propaganda.

Jesus's step-father was a carpenter.

And it's equally true that a historical Paul was not necessary to write the 7 early epistles, anymore than the church needed a real Paul to write the fake 7 epistles.

James The Least

Church tradition is not historicity. It is potentially and theoretically historical, but given the legendary nature of everything surrounding the early church, we have absolutely no reason to assume that Paul must be real.



"Paul presents an essentially different type of religiousness from any found in Palestinian Jewish literature." - E.P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, emphasis his

"Whatever the physiological or psychological analysis of Paul's temperament may be, his conception of life was not Jewish. Nor can his unparalleled animosity and hostility to Judaism as voiced in the Epistles be accounted for except upon the assumption that, while born a Jew, he was never in sympathy or in touch with the doctrines of the rabbinical schools. For even his Jewish teachings came to him through Hellenistic channels, as is indicated by the great emphasis laid upon 'the day of the divine wrath'." - Jewish Encyclopedia Online (1906)

"Paul deliberately misrepresented his own biography in order to increase the effectiveness of his missionary activities...like many evangelical leaders, he was a compound of sincerity and charlatanry...if Paul was not a Pharisee rooted in Jewish learning and tradition, but instead a Hellenistic adventurer whose acquaintance with Judaism was recent and shallow, the construction of myth and theology which he elaborated in his letters becomes a very different thing." - Hyam Maccoby, The Mythmaker

None of these writers are saying Paul is legendary. They are, however, doubting virtually everything the Paul character says -- about himself, about Judaism, about Jesus. These statements could be multiplied a hundredfold. So we are stuck in the same dilemma as the historical Jesus: why is church tradition at such radical variance with what we know of first century history?
Why are Jesus and Paul, ostensibly Jewish people, so radically anti-Jewish in virtually everything attributed to them? The Essenes were anti-Pharisee, but their documents read nothing like Paul's. The Essenes wanted to get back to the pure Torah; Paul wanted to chuck the Torah into the waste-basket.

We thus have good reasons, I think, to believe that Paul, too, is legendary. The massive problems and confusion that must be upheld if his historicity is assumed and his letters deemed authentic vanish if we propose that Paul is himself an invention of the proto-orthodox church.

Diogenes the Cynic

Church tradition does not play into it. "Paul" can defined simply as the common author of those 7 letters (which indubitably had an author) with no other necessary content.

outhouse

because a real man left a impression on enough people to be glorified after his martyred death.


Ignorance here bud.

Pauls epistles are to early. There were no churches then.

When paul talks about churches he is talking about someones dinner table in someones house.

the early movement was from dinner table to dinner table.

The original movement within judaism was against built buildings for worship, theuy all thought the end was coming.


More ignorance, please stop the nonsense.

learn the word tekton please, and come back when you have some knowledge on the subject.

his dad was never a carpenter. In the sense used in the NT it means handworker. Often low life unemployed renters who had lost their house earlier and moved to Nazareth.



if people sitting around a dinner table are going to create fictional mythology, they wouldnt use a criminal like paul to convey a message.

you fail here.

outhouse

most of this post is just rambling from a point of complete ignorance of life in Galilee in the first century.

you know nothing about the culture and its obvious.



You do know there were 4 sects of judaism that one would fit in dont you??

You do know there were many hellensitic jews?

Do you even know what a god-fearer is??

pauls judaism is debated, but he has historicity.

outhouse

thing is there was most certainly more epistles. Some that just didnt make it or redacted for content.

Our friend doesnt understand how later writers claiming to be paul wrote their epistles trying to cover paul up a little, soften his view so to speak as ideas later changed because he was such a radical.

aa5874

Again, you are quite illogical. There is no doubt somebody wrote the letters but when did they write them and are they historically accurate.

For you to PRESUME Only a person named Paul could have written them is hopeless and beyond all semblance of reason.

You ADMIT the Gospels are non-historical and the very authors of the Gospels are NOT considered the real authors yet in your haste to use Galatians 1.19 you have ABANDONED all rational.

The first four authors of the Gospels, Acts of the Apostles, and the General Epistles, including Hebrew and Revelation are unknown yet you fail to acknowledge that the character called Paul may NOT be the real author of any epistle.

If we remove all the Epistles under the name of Paul, then 100% of all the remaining NT authors would be UNKNOWN.

It is almost certain that epistles atrributed to Paul had more than one author and NONE of the Pauline writings have been DATED to the 1st century.

Apologetic sources Place Paul AFTER the Fall of the Temple and letters attempting to place Paul BEFORE c 70 CE has turned out to be forgeries.

You have NO credible source to corroborate Jesus, James and Paul and use your imagination as a source of history.

spin

...working on the assumption that church history hasn't had a hand in the form and/or content of those seven letters.