Doug Shaver

Yes, possible in the sense of not being impossible. I am aware of no evidence for it, though.

He had some kind of experience, but he doesn't say when or where or what actually happened. I think it unlikely that the version given in Acts is a true account of it.

I don't recall anything he said that would suggest such a thing.

aa5874

But, the Pauline writings did NOT shape the new religion AT ALL.

They did not shape the Synoptics in any way. The Synoptic Jesus was totally unaware of the revelations of the Pauline Jesus.

The Jesus in Revelation by John did not say anything like the revelation from Jesus to Paul.

The Pauline Jesus revealed nothing about the New Jerusalem, the new heaven and earth.

And up to the middle of the 2nd century, the Pauline writings had NO effect on Justin Martyr. There was not one single word about the Pauline writers anywhere in all the writings of Justin Martyr.

The evidence tends to indicate that Acts of the Apostles and the Pauline writings are late inventions. Saul/Paul and the Epistles with the name Paul appear to have been invented to attempt to historicise the myth called Jesus the offspring of the Holy Ghost and his twelve disciples.

TimBowe

????

DCHindley

Now I remember.

Schonfield was of the opinion that Paul was a mystic versed in the kind of lore that best exemplified by the Zohar from the middle ages. He may accept the accounts of him in Acts and supposed that Paul was raised in Jerusalem, and studied under the Jewish sage Gamaliel I. Under Gamaliel, Paul learned about mystical ascents, which is how he came to be in the third heaven and received the revelation about his mission in life.

Maybe.

DCH

ApostateAbe

Paul considered Jesus to be the messiah. There seems to be no evidence that he considered himself to be the living image of Christ. The title that he gave himself was "the apostle to the Gentiles," which means that he saw himself as having an exclusive role to play and on the same level as the other apostles. His reputed road-to-Damascus experience was probably not genuine. The only mental pathology I would expect him to have is sociopathy/psychopathy. Such people feel no guilt about lying, and they are often very good at it. It is common among cult leaders, as you may expect.

andrewcriddle

The Zohar is of course late but there are much earlier mystical traditions such as those found in the hekhalot literature. What is very dubious is whether these traditions go back to before the fall of the Temple. They seem to be a response to the loss of the earthly Temple and (maybe) a reaction against developing rabbinic Judaism in the post 70 CE period.

The earliest surviving hekhalot traditions are probably later than the Mishnah.

Andrew Criddle

rhutchin

Not considering the following written by Paul.

1 Corinthians 15
1 Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I preached unto you,...
3 For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures;
4 And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures:
5 And that he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve:
6 After that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep.
7 After that, he was seen of James; then of all the apostles.
8 And last of all he was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time.
9 For I am the least of the apostles, that am not meet to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.
10 But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.
11 Therefore whether it were I or they, so we preach, and so ye believed.

gurugeorge

I think it's extremely plausible that either the Jerusalem people, or Paul, or both, were practitioners of some kind of early Jewish mysticism - but it's probably even misleading to call it Jewish, if you're bringing in the connotations of post-Diaspora Judaism.

(I really must buy that darn book that Price reviewed (or via: amazon.co.uk), and stop relying just on that review as a placeholder in my theory! )

Look, it's pretty evident that Paul is a mystic, and also had visions (that he may have been manic depressive is another possibility - most artists and poets are to some degree, and I don't see any reason to doubt that some genuinely religious types are too). Since he seems to have taken for granted that his audience would have understood certain very gnostic-sounding terms, and things like "third heaven", and given that the goings-on at his Christian worship involved spirit vision, prophecy, and all sorts of practices that verge on the magical, it's highly plausible that he was part of (or had at one time been associated with) a tradition that spoke of these things, and practiced these things.

It's really just the obvious source for his exalted, mystical and magical Christology. "Christ" was Paul's personal deity - his "angel", his little chip of God, like Socrates' "daemon", only a more religious version. (It both appeared seemingly-externally as a vision, and there was a sense of union with it. In vision, it gave him a gospel - i.e. a good-news message to bring to folks.)

As a mystic, clearly THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN A (narrowly circumscribed, mystical) SENSE IN WHICH HE THOUGHT HE WAS CHRIST. He has the "mind" of Christ - which means, he thought of his knowing faculty as a piece of the Divine. And he recommends that you or I get that "mind" too, and think of ourselves in the same way, and live as if we were temples of this Holy Spirit.

But this mystical type of union or unity-with, has nothing to do with megalomania, it's a sort of poetic way of saying things that could also be said in many other different ways (drily as in psychology or Buddhism, or with flowery language, as in Catholicism and Hinduism).

I think that wherever you find mystics making sense, it's probably because they're talking about some basic, spontaneous, and quite deep introspective investigation, that's pretty much recurring and shared across the whole uman race. And "Paul" does sometimes make sense as a mystic, although it's all a bit garbled by probably at least two overlays (Marcionite and Orthodox, if Price and others are right).

DancesWithCoffeeCups

Please note: This is a discussion forum. Not a place to house quotes. Further posts consisting of nothing but quoted text will be moved to ~Elsewhere~, with this one.

aa5874

But, virtually all the prophets of Hebrew Scriptures had visions and revelations and were not considered mystics or gnostics. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Ezekiel, Micah, Nahum, Obadiah, and even the Psalmists had visions.

The Pauline writer just basically used Hebrew Scripture as his source but claimed he had some revelations.

Once it is taken into consideration that apologetic sources claimed Paul was aware of gLuke then the Pauline writer was not mad at all. He was just lying.

His supposed revelations were lifted from Hebrew Scriptures and the Synoptics.

For example, a Pauline writer claimed he received certain information from the Lord after the Lord Jesus was supposed to be in heaven.

Examine 1 Cor 11.23 Surely the Pauline writer most probably did NOT receive this information from the resurrected and ascended Jesus in heaven but from an earthly source.

Examine Luke 22.17-20 This is an indication that the Pauline writer was not mad.

It must not be forgotten that apologetic sources placed Paul after the resurrection and ascension of Jesus and after the day of Pentecost when the disciples were filled with the Holy Ghost.

The Jesus stories including the day of Pentecost story were all fabricated after the Fall of the Temple and they are fiction stories but they pre-date Paul and he did acknowledge that he preached the faith he once destroyed and that he persecuted believers in the fiction stories.