Doug Shaver

We don't have his word for that. What we have is Irenaeus's word that Polycarp told him about having met John. Polycarp's extant writings don't mention any such meeting.

gdeering

Only if we accept these stories as having any truth to them, tales of drama and intrigue!

There's no evidence that Paul met any of the twelve, and those he did meet of similar name to the Apostles are hardly treated as experts.


Gregg

DCHindley

Your post raises 2 question:

1) I assume you mean the letters of Paul? If these, or parts of these, are made up, why invent the friction suggested in them? Acts presents a sanitized version with no friction. If you should answer that the letters were written to counter an opposing POV, you would have to outline what you think that POV was, and how you know it.

2) Paul meeting some "of similar name to the Apostles" (presumably Cephas, James and John) is interesting, but would have to assume that the Pauline letters to the Galatians and Corinthians are at least partly genuine. While there is a parallel to the Galatians situation mentioned in the first few chapters of Galatians in Acts 15, it is not a slam dunk fit.

I have suggested before that Cephas, James & John were priests in Jerusalem who had agreed to accept freewill gifts from Paul's God-fearing gentiles as if they were Israelites, thus making Paul an "apostle" (in the sense that it had in post 70's time, as emessaries of the Jewish Patriarch in Jamnia). After Paul's letters were adapted for Christian use, and these figures became associated with apostles and key figures of similar name in the canonical gospels (John and James), someone added the blurb in John equating Peter with Cephas so all three could be linked directly to the gospels.

DCH

show_no_mercy

Yes, I should have mentioned that.

spamandham

...perhaps they are nothing more than a literary creation?

They seem to have been concocted to demonstrate that Jews were so stupid that they couldn't even recognize the Messiah when he walked among them.

Self-Mutation

O atheist how I long for you to come back to reality!

Do you really think some lowly educated simpleton in the first century was clever enough to just make up a fictional story and get 2 billion people around the world to follow it?

Some first century smuck just DOWNRIGHT FOOLING the greatest minds and scholars and thinkers and philosophers of the 21st century over a simple manuscript?

Gee I sure would LOVE to meet this literary genius!

or maybe....just maybe.....it is an act of God?

Deus Ex

How many Muslims feel the same way about the Koran?

How many people have fallen for Joseph Smith's con? I believe the Mormon Church has some 13 million followers as of last count.

People are credulous.

Toto

In the first place, we don't know who the author of Mark was, and there is no indication that he (she?) was a lowly simpleton. As with other creative geniuses, he drew on past literary works and universal themes.

It's like asking if you really think that a simple blind poet was clever enough to write the Homeric epics that have captivated billions of people through the ages, or if you really think that a simple Elizabethan was clever enough to write Shakespeare's plays.

But - however unlikely you think any of this, it is more probable that the supernatural explanation.

Rick Sumner

Vork was a big fan of "Mark the creative genius." I've never been persuaded.

kai...kai...kai...

That's not the work of a creative genius. That's the work of someone patchworking things together. The pace is breakneck, but sloppy, and maintains its pace by an almost complete lack of transitional elements. If Mark were a "creative genius" one might expect his creativity to extend beyond neatly broken blocks. Unless we assume that he was a "creative genius" in manufacturing the blocks, and then decided to slam them all together rather slapdash.

While I suspect that traditionally we've probably given too much credence to the existence of many pericopes, and probably understated how much creativity Mark employed, I see little reason to think that the usual suggestion of its authorship/redaction isn't fundamentally correct.

Toto

My point does not depend on Mark rising to the level of "genius."

What do you consider the "usual suggestion" of authorship?