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Veteran Member
Join Date: Feb 2012
Location: Auburn ca
Posts: 4,269
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Toto
I have heard Price say this on his podcast, and I intend to get his latest book.
For now, in his essay The legend of Paul's conversion, he notes:
Quote:
To suspect or reject the historical basis of the story of Paul's conversion as we read it in Acts is certainly nothing new in the history of scholarship. Indeed, one might have thought the issue settled long ago, with a negative verdict, by Baur, Zeller, and Haenchen.2 The contradictions and implausibilities of the three linked episodes (Paul's persecution after Stephen's stoning; his vision of the Risen Jesus on the Damascus Road; and his catechism and baptism by Ananias) are well known. To review just a few of them, and thus to beat a dead horse, the Stephen martyrdom (as Hans-Joachim Schoeps,3 followed by Robert Eisenman,4 suggests) is a fictionalization of the story of the martyrdom of James the Just in similar circumstances (as one can still glimpse in Acts 7:52, "... the Just One, whom you have now betrayed and murdered."). Luke's reduction of the Jewish Sanhedrin to a howling lynch mob is not to be dignified with learned discussion. Worse yet, Saul has been appended to the narrative by means of a typical Lukan blunder. The Law mandated the casting aside of the clothes of the one executed, not those of his executioners, but Luke has Saul play coat-check for the mob. And then Saul does not so much spearhead as personify the persecution, which, as Haenchen notes,5 is primarily a piece of "darkness before the dawn" hagiography anticipating the impending conversion of the enemy of the faith. The whole church is supposedly dispersed, jailed, or tortured into blaspheming Jesus, but the Apostles and myriads of their followers remain unmolested all the way into chapter 21. Saul obtains a hunting license from the high priest to persecute Jewish Jesus-believers in Damascus, though in fact the jurisdiction of that worthy extended into Damascus no more than did that of Quirinius into Bethlehem.
That the Damascus Road Christophany is the creation of Luke is evident, first, from the fact that, for artistry's sake, he quite properly varied the details between his three accounts, even as he had with his two accounts of the Ascension, a full forty days apart. As James Barr said regarding the latter case, a writer who is so little concerned for consistency cannot very well have been striving for historical accuracy.6 Second, as Gerhard Lohfink notes, Luke's stories copy standard scriptural type-scenes (to borrow Robert Alter's phrase).7 The scenes "work" because they prompt the reader to recall the biblical prototypes. Since he offers them as transparent literary allusions, he simply cannot have expected his readers to take such scenes as historical reportage. And the Damascus Road episode certainly does embody such a type-scene, the kind Lohfink calls the "double vision." In such a sequence a heavenly visitant grants the protagonist a revelation, adding that at the very same moment he/she is appearing to someone elsewhere with instructions to meet/help the protagonist.8 A third reason, and the strongest of all, as we will see, is that, while Paul's epistles provide nary a historical peg from which to hang the Lukan tale, there are strikingly close literary prototypes on which Luke seems to have drawn.
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Read that a few time last year, and a hour before you posted it.
It only addresses Stephan, and the Damascus event and does not address him not persecuting Christians in general.
Damascus is later in his hunting spree.
Anyway, your the one who hijacked OPs thread with your off topic remarks against the Jewish origins of Christianity.
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02-07-2013, 06:12 PM
