aa5874

Your scenario is EXTREMELY unlikely.

Who could have interpolated the teachings of "Paul" when he would have been known to be a PUBLIC HERETIC if you are assuming he did NOT preach and teach about Christ?

What is the benefit for the Church to have Canonised KNOWN Heretical writings while also identifying Heretics and their Heresies?

It is FAR more likely that the Pauline writings were written fundamentally as they were found as seen in "P 46".

The abundance of evidence from antiquity suggests that the Pauline writings are historically a PACK OF LIES.

The Pauline Jesus Christ, THE END OF THE LAW, cannot be accounted for in the writings of Josephus, Tacitus and Suetonius.

All three writers MULTIPLE-ATTESTED that the JEWS expected Messianic rulers at around 70 CE. See WARS of the Jews 6.5.4, Suetonius "Life of Vespasian", and Tacitus "Histories" 5.

andrewcriddle

Greek and French text at Dion livre49 the word used is σταυρῷ

Andrew Criddle

gurugeorge

I think you'll find that Doherty, at least (haven't read Acharya S) only does that when you get scholarly/apologist pooh-poohing of mythicism. It's like, "Ok, if it's so easy and it's been done before, let's see your critique."

IOW, mythicists asking the scholarly community to disprove their case tends to occur in the context of the scholarly community's claim that the case has been easily disproved.

gurugeorge

Sure, I'm just commenting on that quick, ready motion of your mind there being sort of characteristic of the slippage that misses the force of the mythicist position.

You say "it sounds reasonable to you". But is it? Is it really reasonable to speculate on Paul's psychology as the answer to the "silences"?

"Oh he just wasn't interested."

"He wasn't that type of guy".

Poppycock - one has no way of knowing those things. That sort of psychologizing only makes sense on the prior assumption of a historical Jesus.

Reasonable for a believer, of course, but not if one is trying to be an objective scholar. In that case, one lets the writings speak for themselves, in temporal order. No mention of anyone eyeballing, talking to, learning from, a human Jesus in the earliest known text? Well, one very glaringly obvious reason for that might be there wasn't one, and the human Jesus was a later elaboration. Of cousre if there were independent evidence of a human Jesus, then the psychologizing of Paul would have a good rationale, but absent that evidence, it's just retroactively intepreting the earlier text on the basis of the later. That doesn't seem terribly sensible.

TedM

I take it you think Paul would have been very interested in the human Jesus. Has it ever occurred to you that once he found out about the human Jesus he lost most of his interest and decided to focus on the resurrection aspect only?

Toto

This appears to be a way of forcing the known facts to fit your preconceptions, but it doesn't make a lot of sense -- unless perhaps Jesus was a shameful lunatic who was justly executed by the Romans? But how does that work?

gurugeorge

Because "orthodoxy" (the beginnings of the Catholic Church) was a relative latecomer on the scene (the beginning glimmerings being Justin Martyr, "Polycarp" and Ignatius).

What it called "heresies" were the churches that came first (which were more like philosophico-mythical cults, or mystical cults, or proto-Gnostic cults, centred around the fashionable notion of kenosis, or self-sacrificing deity, or intermediary - one of whose founders was the person whose writings were later co-opted to become the "letters of Paul").

spin

I notice that TedM frequently tries to speculate his way out of trouble.

gurugeorge

I have no opinion on what "Paul" would have been interested in, other than a general basis for what your average religious human being might be interested in. That's all you can have, if you take the "Paul" writings as if they'd just been discovered in a jar in the desert, with only whatever historical/cultural background we know about from the supposed time of the writings to give context.

What I find in the "Paul" writings is, simply, that there is no mention of anyone "Paul" talks about ever speaking to, or witnessing a human Jesus, and little to lead one to suspect that there ever might have been. It's a vague possibility, but it's pretty low on the list of priorities. Some of the content of the myth "Paul" is talking about seems to be historical, but no more especially so than other myths (which sometimes had fleshly aspects to them, or historical places and people mentioned).

More glaringly obvious is that "Paul" very definitely had a visionary Jesus. That's the only positive content relating to this Jesus entity that we have from Paul: he's a vision, a hallucination, a "god".

Now, as I say, if there were otherwise independent evidence of a human Jesus, then one might say "ah yes, the fellow was a stone-gone mystic and obvious didn't care about the human Jesus". That's how it would fall.

But until you have that evidence, all you know is that the Jesus "Paul" is talking about seems to be purely a visionary entity - an entity he hallucinated, spoke to, etc., and entity that perhaps claimed to have been on Earth at some time in the past, but not an entity "Paul" or anyone he speaks of - INCLUDING THE JERUSALEM PEOPLE - ever knew in the flesh.

Solo

Here is a relevant view - some things just don't change:

Ladies and gentlemen, the excerpt comes from a book which was completed in 1913. What has changed in the intellectual grade of the mythical theories presented since ?

Note, for example the expressed view that the MJers are not making use of the opportunities which present themselves. Both, Wells and Doherty failed singularly to attack the absurdly overgrown 'science' of Q, which would have greatly surprised Schweitzer (who himself was a supporter of Matthew priority). In case of Wells, he in the end gave up as he clearly found himself overmatched on the ground that he chose. Doherty's attempt to swing Q in his favour is nothing if not laugable. The only utility that Q has, is to manufacture strata of tradition which are closer to the historical Jesus. It is not by accident that 'Q' grew directly out of another quest for a textual holy grail, that of Papias' sayings' collection of the Lord, supposedly collected by Matthew in Hebrew or Aramaic. That its silly, self-validating, methods do not have any solid ground to stand on has been well demonstrated recently by Marc Goodacre (The Case Against Q (or via: amazon.co.uk)). Like the the Strowger Switch , which dominated telephone exchange technology into 1970 even though it was known to be an unsound design for decades, Q only stands because of its 'installed base' of academic believers.

Best,
Jiri