gurugeorge

That's just a fluffed-up, fanciful expansion of "Paul's" confession of visionary experience in the Epistles, with the intent of reconciling him to the Jerusalem Christians in a particular way (connected with what I was saying in the last post about the necessity to have him have a certain kind of relationship with "Peter", who is a fabrication loosely based on the real, but obscure Cephas).

Not sure what you're talking about here. Do you understand what a claim to visionary experience means? From the description in the Epistles, "Paul'"s experience of Jesus was visionary - he "met" him in something like a waking dream state, kind of like a hallucination. IOW it really seemed to him like he was talking to an independent, living, though spiritual entity, who spoke back to him (much as you'd talk to someone in a dream and they might talk back).

Again, there's no reason to call his claim to visionary experience "invention" without further evidence. As I said a few posts ago, it isn't all that unusual for people to have visionary experiences, you could do it too if you isolated yourself and starved yourself for a few days, did some breathing exercises, etc. It's not inconceivable to the extent that one would somehow require special proof of the claim. The author of the epistles might be inventing it, but it's for you to prove that. And taking into account what I said above about the non-necessity to have any sort of visionary experience in a totally fabricated "Paul" story at all, you've got your job cut out for you.

That's part of the raison d'etre I spoke about above - the need to have the "good guy" version of "Paul" tied to "Peter" - it's merely a nice sentimental touch that both die in Rome under Nero. Maybe he thought Acts hadn't done a good enough job in its "harmonization" between the "good Paul" (representing the proto-Gnostic churches friendly to the orthodox church, and half the orthodox Roman lineage itself) and "Peter" (representing the fabricated lineage back to Joshua Messiah himself, via a propagandistic version of the early Jerusalem Christian story). (With the "bad Paul" - Simon Magus - being the founder of the recalcitrant proto-Gnostic "heretics", and of course the Marcionites.)

There's no need for the entire history of Paul to be an invention (there might be a few bits and pieces of stories about the real man in Acts). Just the bits relating to his relationship to the Jerusalem Christians, which prepares the ground for his relationship to the genuinely fabricated "Peter" (whose connection with the real Cephas is merely via a silly name analogy and whose real importance is as an invented lineage connection to Joshua Messiah himself, as opposed to "Paul's" well-known, but merely visionary connection).

aa5874

Again, you yourself is claiming that "Paul" had a certain kind of relationship with a fabricated character, Peter.

You appear to be correct that Peter was fabricated, he used to walk on water, saw Jesus transfigure, and witnessed Jesus alive after death.

But according to Eusebius, Peter and Paul were preaching in Rome and died around the same time.

You think Peter was a fabrication and "Paul" was not?

"Paul" had a relationship with an invention called Peter, why is Paul not an invention?

But, didn't you notice that "Paul" or should I say, the author himself, is confused.

The author doesn't know whether or not he was hallucinating, how is it you know that he was? You appear to be inventing stuff.

2 Corinthians 12.2-3 And if your hallucination story is true , then it can be considered that "Paul" is a product of hallucinations, and that "Paul" did not even realise that.



My work is done. "Paul" has been found to be an invention.

His conversion was invented, his revelations form a RISEN DEAD MAN was invented, he had a relationship with an invented character called Peter and both of their deaths were invented by Eusebius in Church History.

Is this your imagination or just another invention?

From where do you get your bits and pieces ? From the hallucinated!

gurugeorge

Hang on a sec, are you seriously telling me that you wouldn't consider the possibility that there might have been a real Peter but his story was simply embellished? Are you seriously telling me that you basing your theories and judgements on the basis of the application of real world scientific criteria to the prima facie text? If so, I have to say that's a pretty weird thing to do!

Yes, primarily because as I said, I find it difficult to see why any visionary remnants would be kept in a totally made-up story (far less exaggerated in the Damascus story) when all they do is cause problems (it would surely have been easier to have Paul simply be a student of the purported Apostles or something like that).

Why should he be? I'm only calling Peter an invention because I have reasons to think he was - I don't have reasons to think Paul was (although I do have reasons to think there is some invention in his story in Acts, as well as the schizophrenic split into "good guy" and "bad guy" versions, and some interpolation in his Epistles).

He's talking about him being in or out of the body - i.e. he's not sure whether his visionary experience took the form of what we would nowadays call an OOBE (a meeting in the "seventh heaven" perhaps) or more like a plain vision (hallucination-like appearance) of meeting someone on the road.

No, he was hallucinating either way (although I'd be careful applying "hallucination", I use it more as an analogy than example; visions can be had while sane, so hallucination with its connotation of insanity could be misleading).

Not quite: he was a real mystic and visionary, who kick-started a proto-Gnostic religion, based on a reversed-values variant of the Messiah idea, spread it quickly to several gentile cities, including Rome, and wrote some Epistles to his flock. These basic facts (with maybe a few well-known specific incidents) were then embellished and turned into propaganda for an orthodox Roman church that was moving away from its proto-Gnostic roots and attempting to take over the contemporary descendants of the other churches this man had started.

This way of looking at it still has a mythical Jesus, but still preserves a good deal of Biblical scholarly findings, and still has a remarkable, charismatic human being at the root of the religion.

aa5874

I did consider that Peter and Paul may have been real, but after reading Church History, the NT, Tacitus, Suetonius, Josephus, Philo, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Justin Martyr, Origen and others, and using a most important finding or deduction that all the Gospels and Acts of the Apostles were written after the so-called death of Peter and Paul, I now conclude Peter and Paul were inventions.

You make it seem as though "Paul" cannot tell the difference between the real and halucinations.

You mean "Paul" did not know if he himself was real or that he had a body?

I just cannot understand what you are saying.




You position on Paul is based on a reverse-variant Messiah, mass hallucinations, fiction, embellishments, inventions and the unsubstantiated words of the hallucinated.

You are not in a very good position.

Solo

Oh, I think he was quite sure of his experience, gg, and nowhere in Paul's letters you will find anything to support the later naive tale of hallucinated Jesus' paying back Saul for his misdeeds on the road to Damascus. Paul in 2 Cor 12 plainly states that the experience of "man in Christ" was euphoric (at first, at any rate). When he says he was not sure whether he was in or out of his body, he indeed is decribing an OBE , a paradoxical mental state, in which the brain "loses" its body map but semi-conscious, often resulting in a feeling of being abducted, or manipulated by some external agent, in people who do not induce such states purposely, e.g. through meditation.

Jiri

aa5874

You think he was sure, but the author wrote "I cannot tell", perhaps then he was faking his uncertainty.

I think the author called "Paul" got his revelations about the ONCE DEAD Jesus from gLuke since the RISEN dead Christ once revealed to him the words of the author of Luke from heaven.

gurugeorge

No, I mean that it sounds to me that he wasn't sure whether his vision had been (as we moderns would put it) like an OOBE or like a hallucination - i.e. whether it was an astral vision where he seemed to himself to travel to some kind of astral "realm" (like the "third heaven" he mentions in one of the Epistles) and talked to Jesus there, or whether it was like the kind of hallucination you might have where you're walking along the road normally, say, and you seem to have an encounter with someone (that's of the type of what we moderns would call a hallucination).

That's pretty clear

In order to really get what I'm saying here you've got to understand that my reconstructions take the experiential component of religion as primary, and I look at whatever scribblings we have from that perspective. There are in my view two fundamental experiental components to religion - visionary experience and mystical experience. It's from experiences like these by the founders of religions that the ideas and writings originally come - religious founders generally either have a unitive mystical experience in which they "see God" or "see everything as One", or something of the sort; or they have a visionary experience (like a lucid dream, or OOBE, or LSD hallucination) in which they seem to themselves to meet and talk to entities that aren't human, though they may take human form, but are rather divine beings. Or sometimes both (mystical and visionary). (Note: I am not validating their experiences, but I am taking seriously how it seemed to them. IOW I am taking a heterophenomenological approach.) They then talk about these experiences to others, or write about them, and elaborate them with theologies etc. Then, after those stories and descriptions are heard second hand, third hand, and eventually hundredth hand, people who haven't necessarily had these kinds of experiences start to spin their own yarns and theologies and philosophies based on those original ideas that came from someone's experience. If you want some substantiation for why I take this position, read William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience.

That's the over-arching context of how I look at religion - at the Bible, the Upanishads, the Daodejing, the Tripitaka, the Mahayana texts, descriptions of shamanic journeys, etc., etc., etc., etc., et multae ceterae. That kind of experiential encounter/epiphany is the very core of religion as a world-wide phenomenon.

In the light of this, either Joshua Messiah was a mystic/visionary himself, or he is a myth promulgated by another mystic/visionary (or several of them). In view of the lack of evidence for the first position, I take the second position.

I think I am - those are precisely the materials that religion is made of

(PS if you check out the neo-Gnostic internet radio station I've flagged in another thread just recently, you'll find an interview with Robert Price where he talks about the Simon Magus = Paul idea, also on another interview about the existence of Samaritan Joshua cults before the Joshua Messiah cult.)

gurugeorge

I think it's quite possible that he's just making a poetic, literary exaggeration, but I was just talking about it to aa taking the line literally.

Agreed. Again, I'm trying to get a point across to aa, who doesn't seem to be able to wrap his mind around the notion of visionary experience at all.

Yupyup. As I've said before, I think we're roughly on the same wavelength in all this, only you prefer to take a somewhat more pathological view of religious phenomena than me (more a weighting than an absolute distinction, I do think some of it is pathological, and I do take on board your notion of religion as a "self-justifying refuge" for the troubled).

aa5874

It sounds to me that you also "cannot tell" what "in the body or out of the body" means.

And did Paul get his numbers right? Was it really the "third" heaven? I don't know if you have to be "out of your body" to be in the "third" heaven.

But even though Paul claimed he "cannot tell", he did say, "God knows", but God knows what?


And how do I know or you yourself know when you are wrong or have have made an error in your analyses or reconstructions of these mystical and visionary experiences of Paul?



But Simon was a just magician, Paul appears to be insane or was just faking his insanity. Simon and Paul do not appear to be similar.

Solo

No, the uncertainty that Paul was expressing in 2 Cr 12:2 is of the object we normally refer to as I, to which he refers as a man in Christ, and the relation to his own body during the experience of ascent to the "third heaven". He was not faking anything. Paul recounts this experience specifically to disclaim that there is anything - in and of itself - in boasting of the experiences of the Lord, or that the "knowledge" he acquired in his transport (2 Cr 12:4) can be made intelligible. He also admits in his letter of tears that he is perplexed by the business of Christ (2 Cr 4:8).

Does this strike you as someone who is faking something ? Have you heard those sort of things from the televangelists ? Did Paul try to make money from his troubles ?

You are free to think what you will, aa.

Jiri