Sheshbazzar

The 'problem' is Paul _never met Jesus in the flesh_ and his accounts of his 'vision' and of exactly what words he claims to have 'heard'.
and in a latter account.
So what were the exact words of 'Jesus' that Paul 'heard' that day?

Paul's personal accounting of the contents of his only reported conversation with 'Jesus' is short, yet varies and is inconsistent.
(both accounts are given in the first person singular "I", and are equally accounted as being Christian 'Scripture'.)
Moreover, the few words that are ascribed to be words of 'Jesus' in either case, do almost nothing at all to give support to all of the the contrived and convoluted theological reasoning's and claims that come to appear within the rest of the Pauline corpus.

'Paul' claims that his doctrine did not come from men, and that he was not taught it by men, however the rest of his story indicates that he did learn any further details from men (or made them up to suit the needs of his evolving religious beliefs)

Thus there is a serious 'problem' with 'Paul's' (and 'Christianity's') credibility.
Where, and when was it that Jesus ever said to Paul;
"I am the Messiah, I was recently here on Earth, in the flesh, born of the line of David." ?
You won't find it in The Bible, nor within 'Paul's' writings.

Steven Carr

Why would Paul need to say such things if everybody knew that Jesus was a recent human being?

After all, allegedly Paul never mentions any miracles because people knew all about them, but he has to tell people Jesus was human?

gurugeorge

Good post. However, (following Price and the Dutch Radicals) I don't trust Acts - it's way late and way too fishy. I'm taking my cue on what "Paul" may have experienced based on the (accepted as genuine) Epistles only (albeit there's probably still some interpolation in the genuine ones). It's pretty clear from the Epistles that "Paul" must have had conversations with Jesus in vision (he got his gospel direct from Jesus); it's also clear that the kind of Christianity "Paul" organized had prophecy, tongues, etc. (i.e. people likely had their own visionary revelations of the "living Jesus" in his churches, just as they do today sometimes). It's also clear that "Paul" believed, at the very least, that Jesus had a fleshly aspect in some sense (i.e. he believed he had been on the earth and been crucified - I don't follow Doherty in this area really, I don't see any necessity to interpret "flesh" in any other than a literal sense).

Of course, this is all still somewhat ambiguous between HJ and MJ. It's conceivable that he could have heard of a man Jesus before he had his visions, but the point is, there's no clue to that in the Epistles; nor is it clear from the Epistles that the Jerusalem people had known a human Jesus either. So far as I can tell from the Epistles, it's myth all the way down, with the myth itself merely having a fleshly component, like many other myths.

That's why I say: it looks for all the world that the visionary Jesus is "Paul's" source for the doings of Jesus. And even if the Jerusalem crowd also had a Jesus before him, going by the Epistles, it looks like their Jesus was visionary too (more accurately: some combination of vision and Scriptural "revelation"). If the "Paul as convert" stuff in Acts has some truth, it's quite conceivable that he heard of their visionary Jesus (still a myth with a corporeal aspect), and thought it was heretical until he had his own experience.

But I insist on this fundamental point: what modern historical sensibility would need would be some connection, in the Epistles, the recognised earliest texts we have, between "Paul", the Jerusalem people, and some human being whom they knew personally, were disciples of, and called "Jesus". That just isn't there: for whatever reason, it isn't there, and that absence of evidence is the only starting point we have, FWIW. What is there, what's absolutely certain, is "Paul"'s visionary experience (and proabably visionary experience/revelation via Scripture, from the Jerusalem people too).

Now the really curious thing is: if "Paul"'s Christianity is based on mere visionary experience (the value of which, in relation to a genuine apostolic successsion, is so well pooh-poohed in the Pseudo Clementines), why was he included in the Canon when the Church supposedly had authentic lineage going back to disciples of the Man Himself? Why muddy waters that were supposedly already clear? Why include a writer, "Paul", who often seems proto-Gnostic, uses terms that are later said to be Gnostic, and was considered by Tertullian the "apostle of the heretics", AT ALL? OK, Marcion - but that just puts it back a stage.

This, to me, is the real "smoking gun" - the mystery of why "Paul", a mere visionary, for some reason had to be included in the Canon of a lineage that supposed itself to have "apostolic succession".

aa5874

But, your statement cannot BE shown to be true. It is quite the opposite. Paul did not converse with a non-human entity. Paul MUST have gotten his gospel either from himself or it was from some EARTHLY source.

Paul's claims of vision are all unsubstantiated.


It cannot be shown that Paul organised any churches where people spoke in tongues, the Pauline Churches cannot be found in any sources of antiquity.

No gospel writer wrote about speaking in tongues except the late version of gMark as found canonised which was probably written after Acts of the Apostles.

Paul's Jesus is the same Jesus of the NT, the God/man, the immaterial/material, the Creator/created being who was raised from the dead and ascended to heaven.

No-one in Judea could have seen such a creature alive and, just as expected, no author of the Jesus stories, nor Paul, did claim that they did.

The authors of gMatthew, gMark, gLuke, gJohn, Acts of the Apostles, and the Pauline Epistles did not write, "I personally saw Jesus alive and I personally talked to him."

Paul saw Jesus when he REALLY could not.

He and over 500 people saw Jesus when he could NOT REALLY be seen.

They all saw him in a resurrected state, in an immaterial state.

dog-on

Osmosis.

show_no_mercy

How can you be the "catholic" church without reappropriating the most popular apostle? The apostle of the "visionary" Christianities? Paul (maybe Simon Magus) was just too popular to ignore by the Christianity that appealed to the historical witnesses.

gurugeorge

aa, we've been through this before. It is possible for people to seem to themselves to talk to entities who don't physically exist. Therefore there is nothing remarkable or dubious about what Paul says at all: there is no reason whatsoever not to take him at his word.

Try it yourself. There are numerous ways of getting to it. One way is through lucid dreaming - write down your dreams as you remember them on waking for a few weeks, and as you become more sensitive to your dreams, you will start to develop the facility to wake up in the dream. The other way round is the traditional "occult" method of astral travel - by practice, you can start to develop the faculty to seem to yourself to come out of your body, and move around in the physical world, then ascend to a plastic, but quite real-seeming dream landscape, in which you can meet and talk to entities who talk back. This is helped by keeping odd sleeping hours, fasting, breathing exercises, etc.

If you doubt it, check out this article in the Straight Dope, from a rationalist and sceptic who has done it himself - and had great fun with it. Cognitive science is starting to explore these types of phenomena now too - cf. the work of Thomas Metzinger and Susan Blackmore. It's all explainable through normal brain processes, and in fact investigation in this area is quite enlightening for understanding how the mind works, how our concepts of "soul" may have developed, etc., etc. It's not common or sanctioned in our society and hasn't been for several thousand years, but it's - well, not exactly common but accepted and known about, and sanctioned, in some other societies, and was known about and sanctioned in many ancient societies (think about why magic has "disappeared from the world", think how common magic was in ancient times).

Now if none of this sort of thing happened, then I agree we would be in our rights to think "Paul" was lying, but since it happens, as I said, there's no reason not to take him at his word - moreover, there's no reason not to take any of the religious founders of the past, from Mohammed to Madame Wei (founder of Shangqing Daoism), at their word, wrt to what seemed to them to be happening (i.e. they seemed to themselves to be talking to gods, spirits, demons, etc.)

It baffles me how some rationalists can't seem to get their heads around this. It really is the most obvious source of religious ideas. Nobody who hasn't had this type of experience would naturally come up with the notion of spirits, gods, demons, etc., etc.! (Would you????) Once you've had this type of experience, it's easy to see how pre-scientific people could have these experiences and believe that they really were talking to God/the tree spirit/demons, etc, etc., etc., etc.

The whole bizarre phenomenon of religion just clicks into place, without having to impute stupidity, insanity or con artistry to half of humanity.

gurugeorge

Yes, this is what I suspect - and it ties in with Walter Bauer's Orthodoxy and Heresy, and thereby provides a kind of "smoking gun" substantiation of the idea that mythicist Christianity came first.

IOW, the early Christians may well have believed that Jesus lived on the earth and was crucified in the flesh, etc., etc., but in the earliest stages his biography wasn't at all detailed, and the "story" developed over time. The heavy historicization of Christ is an artefact of the necessity of this initially minority subsect we call "orthodoxy" to trump the merely visionary claims of the real founders of Christianity, most especially "Paul" (the "apostle of the heretics" no less!) with a made-up lineage supposedly going back to disciples of Christ himself (i.e. this is what the first "apostles" were construed as, by orthodoxy, to boost themselves). But they had to include "Paul" (since many extant churches had actual lineage from him), and somehow reconcile him with their theology: hence the fabrication of Acts, and the splitting of the real founder of Christianity into good guy version ("Paul", representing those who kowtowed to orthodoxy) and a bad guy version ("Simon Magus" representing the recalcitrant Christians later called "Gnostics", and still later, once substantially tamed, "docetists").

The logic is clear as day in the Pseudo-Clementines (which I suspect originally to have been an alternative or aborted version of what Acts was supposed to do): "Peter" points out to "Paul" that merely visionary experience is valueless if you have disciples who were taught by Christ himself.

Tail wagging the dog.

dog-on

Like I said, osmosis...

And again, I think that all of this further suggests that Paul is the historical founder of Christianity. So if anything, the historical Jesus is Paul.

Sheshbazzar

If a being with no actual verifiable historical evidence can rightly be described as being 'historical'.
But not to forget, there was a well known prototypical Hebrew/Jewish 'Joshua' hero/saviour legendary figure well in place for hundreds of years before being co-opted by the Christian mythos. And if a myth figure can rightly be described as being historical, then the 'Joshua's' of the Hebrew Scriptures are also the 'historical Jesus'.