Toto

The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity by Hyam Maccoby. That's the Amazon link, but you local Barns and Noble probably has a remainded copy for about half that price.

Radcliffe Emerson

Mageth summed up my replies nicely. And there is no proof even Paul suffered any, other than his own words.
I still say he found an easy way to make a living and used it to sponge off people.

Much like evangelists today.

boneyard bill

Where is there any great disparity between the teachings of Paul and the teachings of Jesus? They approached their subject in different ways but their ethics are very similar. Of course, Jesus seems to preach a salvation by works in the synoptics, but even there it seems to be more a state of consciousness he is advocating more than individual deeds. And in the Fourth Gospel he claims to be the way to salvation just a Paul preaches.

Toto

I think that the major disparity is that the Jesus depicted in the gospels said that he was there to uphold the law (i.e., the Mosaic law given to Jews) and that his mission was to the lost sheep of Israel.

Paul, however, is an apostle to the gentiles who disparages the law (especially circumcision and the dietary laws.)

Their ethics were similar to Greco-Roman ethical ideas of the time.

Kosh

Hey PC!

Have you run off already? After only one day of posting?

leftfist

This is a topic I love to speculate about, and I think it's very likely that Paul co-opted Christianity, but unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a lot of concrete information about exactly how that happened.

Here's a few things...

"First and foremost, I handed on to you the tradition I had received: that Christ died for our sins, in accordance with the scriptures; that he was buried; that he was raised to life on the third day, in accordance with the scriptures; and that he appeared to Cephas, and afterwards to the Twelve. Then he appeared to over five hundred of our brothers at once, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, and afterwards to all the apostles. Last of all he appeared to me too; it was like a sudden, abnormal birth."
1 Corinthians 15:3-8

Somebody above mentioned that Paul may have invented Jesus completely. This seems unlikely since Paul here talks about Peter and James and others knowing Jesus also. One thing I think is significant is that it does not appear to me that this matches the Gospels+Acts account of the post-resurrection appearances, where the Twelve and various other people saw the bodily resurrected Jesus and then much later in an unconnected event, Paul had a vision of Jesus. This brief account seems to indicate that Jesus appeared to Paul in the same manner he appeared to the others. Of course it's not clear enough to be sure.

As usual Paul says nothing about the life of Jesus, which of course makes one speculate that Paul did not conceive of Jesus as an earthly person. It certainly seems strange to me that the NT is dominated by someone who didn't know Jesus in life, while there are no books from any of the many people who supposedly did (unless you buy 1 or 2 Peter or James or something...)

Paul mentions disagreements with Peter and James.
Galatians 2:11-14
How is it that someone who didn't even know Jesus knows more about what Jesus would want than those who did?

The main problem with this is that of course we have no knowledge of what the teachings of Jesus may have been except writings from at least 30 years after Paul began preaching. When I first started reading the NT, I believed that the Gospels were much more likely to contain accurate information about Jesus and early Christianity than Paul's epistles, simply because they took place earlier. I viewed Paul as someone who wasn't initially involved and probably changed things around. Then I realized that while that is probably true of Paul, nevertheless he was writing much earlier and moreover was generally writing to and about people he actually knew. This is a completely different situation from the Gospels, where the authors were writing about events that took place years earlier and about people they very likely never knew. If Paul made up anything, the Gospel authors had plenty of opportunity to be influenced by Paul's stories. Therefore I believe it's much more likely to get accurate information from Paul's epistles.

Radcliffe Emerson

I've seen information in the past though, that there isn't any more evidence that Peter even existed than there is for Jesus existing.

I still think Paul invented Jesus.

leftfist

ithin the context of Paul's epistles, Paul never talks about Jesus's earthly life. As far as the epistles are concerned Jesus may have lived in the distant past, or never have had a normal earthly life at all. It seems reasonable that Paul may have made Jesus up with that information. But he talks about Peter and James as being contemporaries that he still apparently interacts with. It seems much less likely that he would make up living people, if for no other reason than that it would be conceivable that he would be found out.