Ben C Smith

:notworthy:

Well put, that.

Ben.

jakejonesiv

Ben,

I have no idea what you are talking about.

:wave:

Jake Jones IV

Amaleq13

He may have persecuted the Jewish sect but I got the impression that taking the gospel to the gentiles was something new.

If the new store abandons central tenets of the original store and focuses exclusively on a new customer base, the name is generally changed and you have a new franchise.

jakejonesiv

JJ,

The key word in your comment is "only" so I will agree.

But I will ask you a different question, "How do you know what Paul wrote?"

Jake Jones IV

Ben C Smith

Granted.

But we do not have a new exclusive customer base. Paul tells us about the division of labor (within the same company, to carry the analogy forward) in Galatians 2: Peter to the Jews, Paul to the gentiles.

And what tenets did Paul claim to be changing?

I believe it was a new thing. But taking, as you say, the gospel to the gentiles does not mean that it was a different gospel.

Ben.

Ben C Smith

Just smile and wave, boys. Smile and wave. --Skipper the penguin.

:wave:

Ben.

Amaleq13

That looks like a pretty exclusive customer base for Paul to me though I tend to think of his targets as primarily the God-fearers.

The requirements for converting to Judaism (ie adherance to food laws, circumcision).

It was a different gospel than the one Paul calls "false" and, at the very least, that gospel appears to have involved accepting the requirements for conversion to Judaism.

If you aren't actually converting to Judaism to join Paul's movement, you can't really consider it the same religion.

Ben C Smith

Amaleq, are you merely trying to say that Pauline Christianity is different than the kind of Christianity that he persecuted before converting?

Or are you trying to say that if we call the Pauline version Christianity then the version that he persecuted, apparently the version that Cephas and James and John held to, should not even be called Christianity?

Ben.

jjramsey

Look at what I wrote above about the difficulties in interpolation. Quite simply, if the verses suggesting that Jesus was human were interpolated, I'd expect them to be an odd fit either within the letter itself or with other Pauline letters. I might also expect that the interpolations not be in all the surviving manuscripts.

Toto

I'll let Amaleq answer for himself, but whatever Paul persecuted, it was not known as Christianity at the time, by all available information. We don't actually know much about it, but my guess is that it should be regarded as an essentially different religion from post-Pauline Christianity.

And I think that the chance that what we have today as Paul's letters represents what Paul wrote = 0%, or perhaps the chance that any particular passage in Paul's alleged letters was written by Paul to be about 50%.