archibald

Get Paul to sound like he had an earthly figure in mind.

I have this in mind at all times.

The thing here is, it is used twice in close succession here, and Israelis are not angels. :]

Whoever wrote it, it seems that it does prima facie refer to earthly.

And if it's read along with other stuff..............

archibald

Gets my personal vote.


The only difference is that 'Paul' appears to have been almost contemporaneous. And is not the only documentary evidence. There are a lot of references which, even if we go to the independent ones, are not late by the standards of ancient history. And I don't agree we have to go to independent ones. If there were apparently a variety of different 'inside' sources, we would still have to explain them. It's not as if these guys (and the 'Q' tellers) all lived on the same street. And in any case, we can distrust the writers to tell us the facts, but I think religious texts are normally taken to be a reflection of what the writers believed. Not that we can always tell who the writers were.

Every text from ancient history has to be filtered for possible bias. Almost everyone had a subjective agenda. The good thing in the case of religious texts is that it's not as hard to work out what the bias was and take account of it.

Josephus has been called into question (quelle surprise) but so far the evidence seems to suggest partial interpolation only.

Tacitus' seems like quite a decent source to me. Writing only 80 years later (not long in historical terms), being fairly independent and reputed to have been thorough by the standards of the time, he places Christians in Rome after the fire (64CE I think) and arguably as early as 49CE.

The 'but we don't know what they believed' objection would carry more weight for me if there was any evidence that the cult had started out thinking 'spiritual-only leader' and switched to 'actual person', between, say, 55CE (estimate of when Paul wrote to them) and sometime before 110CE. And that's being generous. I see no good reason to think that they had just 'switched' at the end of that spectrum, or indeed that Tacitus did no checking of his sources and just blindly took the word of the member of a despised fringe cult he happened to have spoken to earlier in the same year in which he put his history together.

dog-on

Unless of course kata sarka means something like 'per our worldly point of view', leaving us with something akin to:

Juxtaposed with 2 Cor 5:16

or

So, again, unless you assume your conclusion, I really do not think you have an argument.

ps. I wonder why the word 'came' is in brackets, as I think it actually reads "from whom Christ, who is over all", or something like that. Of course, Christ did come from the Israelites, at least, that is to say, from their books.

J-D

You have not shown that those are reliable sources.

archibald

Please stop saying that sort of thing to other posters who are not doing it. :banghead:

Gotta go here Dog-on.

maryhelena

Don't forget these two sources:


There you go - christians long before the gospel JC starts preaching in the 15th year of Tiberius...

Augustus 27 b.c. to 14 c.e.

dog-on

?

Unless I misunderstood your meaning when you said:

My comment stands.

archibald

Oh, lucky you maryhelena (or lucky me), since I'm just going offline but caught this.

Thanks for that. Sounds very interesting. I'll definitely bear it in mind, and look into it. Not the first time you've added some interesting evidence to my reservoir of knowledge. And I do like evidence. :]

Cheers.

A.

archibald

Only if you are blind to the word 'seems' in conjunction with the words 'prima' and ' facie'. I think more than one person here has clarified the definition as not assuming anything. It's 'appears to be at first sight', or in my sentence 'seems to appear at first sight'.

aa5874

So, essentially the Pauline writings are really NOT authentic based on your view that "Paul" never spoke or wrote 90% of what has been falsely attributed to him.

Well, there is really no evidence at all for "Paul" the Pharisee who preached that Christ Crucified was RAISED on the THIRD day and was the END of the LAW.

The PAULINE doctrine would have been EXTREMELY controversial to Jews and the Romans and yet we have NO opposition to the Pauline claims in the writings of Philo and Josephus.

It appears to be COMPLETE Fiction that a Jew and a Pharisee was ABLE to travel ALL OVER the Roman Empire Before the Fall of the Jewish Temple proclaiming that a JEWISH MAN had a NAME ABOVE EVERY OTHER NAME and that EVERY KNEE IN the ROMAN EMPIRE SHOULD BOW BEFORE the name of a resurrected JEW.

The Pauline doctrine was essentially BLASPHEMY to the JEWS and the DEIFIED Emperors of Rome.

In the Gospels, Jesus was EXECUTED the very same day he BLASPHEMED but it is claimed "Paul" BLASPHEMED for over 17 years.

There is ZERO supporting sources of antiquity for "Paul", the Pauline Jesus and the Pauline doctrine.

In effect, "Paul" may have spoken or written 0% of the so-called "Pauline writings.