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To be precise with your error, Ben C., you represented me as indicating:

The Pauline gospel was messianic.

I have pointed out that in fact Paul, while claiming to be messianic, is certainly not. Stop deliberately misrepresenting my position.


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Ben C Smith

For the purposes of deciding what he meant when he said that his gospel came from no man, it does not matter whether you think his position was messianic; it matters only whether Paul thought it was messianic.

Ben.

spin

And so how does that impact on Paul's claim that his gospel was strictly from revelation?


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Ben C Smith

His gospel (to his own satisfaction) was about a messiah. You pointed out that Paul does not say he got some of the gospel by revelation; by your logic, then, that means he is claiming that his predecessors did not believe in a messiah.

Ben.

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Stick to you day job, Ben C.


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andrewcriddle

Do the claims about Barnabas in Galatians chapter 2 indicate substantial similarities between what Paul taught and what the Jerusalem Apostles taught ?

Barnabas seems at the beginning of Galatians 2 to broadly share Paul's Gospel whereas in verse 13 he has apparently gone over to the other side. There are I suppose various possibilities.
a/ Paul Barnabas and the Jerusalem apostles all believed in an already arrived crucified Messiah. Paul and Barnabas originally believed that this radically changed the status of the Jewish Law but the Jerusalem Apostles did not really agree. Under pressure from Jerusalem Barnabas became more Torah observant leading to a quarrel between him and Paul.
b/ Paul believed in an already arrived crucified Messiah, Barnabas and the Jerusalem Apostles did not. However Paul and Barnabas agreed on a radically changed status of the Jewish Law but the Jerusalem Apostles did not agree. Under pressure from Jerusalem Barnabas became more Torah observant leading to a quarrel between him and Paul.
c/ Paul and Barnabas believed in an already arrived crucified Messiah, the Jerusalem Apostles did not. Paul and Barnabas originally believed that this radically changed the status of the Jewish Law but under pressure from Jerusalem Barnabas (while still believing in an already arrived crucified Messiah) became more Torah observant leading to a quarrel between him and Paul.
d/ Paul and Barnabas believed in an already arrived crucified Messiah, the Jerusalem Apostles did not. Paul and Barnabas originally believed that this radically changed the status of the Jewish Law but under pressure from Jerusalem Barnabas stopped believing in an already arrived crucified Messiah and became more Torah observant leading to a quarrel between him and Paul.

Of these only a/ seems plausible. b/ makes Barnabas' initial position unconvincing, rejecting Torah-observance for no clear reason. c/ raises major issues as to why given their other differences the views of Jerusalem on Torah-observance should matter to Barnabas. d/ Is both implausible in itself and in terms of Paul's response (which never defends the fact of the crucifixion. )

On a more general issue Paul is claiming that the alternative Gospel preached by his opponents is not the same Gospel at all as his, but also clearly worried that people, eg the Galatians, may regard the differences as of secondary importance and be prepared to agree with Paul's opponents to avoid being marginalized. This suggests that Paul's view of the major differences between his Gospel and that of his opponents was not generally obvious.

Andrew Criddle

aa5874

There is a fundamental problem with using information from the letters with the name Paul, there are no corroborative sources for the information in the letters themselves.

Even the author of Acts do not claim that Peter and the other disciples, while filled with the Holy Ghost after the day of Pentecost, were preaching a Torah-based Gospel.

In effect, none of your options are really plausible, just questionable, unless you can find some credible corroborative source for the information in the letters with the name Paul.

How can you use information from the letter writer to both support and contradict the very writer at the same time?

Jayrok

Well I agree Paul doesn't spend time talking about empty tombs or visiting virgin mothers or about Jesus' life on Earth.

Apologists will reply that Paul didn't mention these things because his letters were written for a purpose and they weren't for describing Jesus' human life... or that his audience would have already known those details, etc.

But of course this falls short in my opinion because there were a few times when Paul could have used the words of Jesus or his actions to settle arguments in his church. One such issue dealt with foods sacrificed to idols or otherwise considered unclean. Paul told readers he didn't see foods as unclean and that one man shouldn't talk down to someone who might abstain from pork, for instance. However, it seems the issue would have been closed easily had he simply given Jesus' take on unclean foods (Mark 7).

Another issue in Corinthians where his church wanted to know how the body could be resurrected. Paul gave them his take on the subject. It seems he could have simply reminded them of the empty tomb, how the physical body was gone from the grave. Surely they had heard of that story, right?

If they had heard of that story, or of the story of Lazarus for that matter, why would they have to bother to ask Paul how the dead body would be resurrected from the dead?

So there were places Paul could have used the words of Jesus to solve church issues and to clarify things.

But to play Devil's advocate, we don't have enough information to know for sure that Paul didn't get any details of Jesus' life from Peter. Maybe he heard things but chose to simply not use them in his correspondence. After all, he didn't get his gospel from Peter. We don't know what Paul knew of Jesus other than what we read in his letters.

Jayrok

Question about 1 Timothy 1 and Jesus' historicity:

Paul (presumably) opens this letter by instructing Timothy to stay in Ephesus to keep certain men from teaching false doctrines or devoting themselves to myths and endless genealogies (1 Tim 1:3-4)

Is it possible that these men were teaching about the virgin birth and the Christ's bloodline back to King David as we read in Matthew and Luke?

Is it possible that they heard that Jesus was born of a virgin and in the line of David and were teaching this? If that is so, then Paul is calling the birth a myth?

I know there isn't enough info and speculation is all one would have, but is it possible stories of Jesus' virgin birth and Jewish Bloodline were circulating at the time of Paul? Or 1 Timothy may be a later pseudo-Pauline letter.

Paul seemed to emphasize to Timothy that God's work was all about "faith" (vs 4), not stirring controversies and the like.

Amaleq13

Does Paul ever defend Christ crucified? No.

Paul defends his interpretation of the significance of Christ crucified.

That is what his Galatians had been "bewitched" into abandoning.