Freethought & Rationalism Archive

kcdad · 04-24-2009, 06:52 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sugarhitman

To say that Paul was not aware of the Gospel, is the most absurd claim yet. I sense that this claim has been manufactured to support a later date for the Gospels. Because if Paul's epistles were in the hand of the churches certainly these letters did not precede the Gospels...that would have been backwards. So what Paul didn't go into details about Mary, and other accounts in his epistles....but neither did Peter, Jude, or James in theirs....why should they seeing the churches already had the Gospels.

You DO understand there is a difference between THE Gospel and The Gospels... right?

The Gospels are handwritten, human interpretations of THE Gospel. THE Gospel is what Jesus taught about the Kingdom of God and is retold somewhat in The Gospels.

DID Paul ever read a Gospel according to ______ ? No way.
DID Paul ever talk to followers of Jesus (or followers of followers of Jesus) and learn about Jesus' teachings...? Of Course.
Were the Gospel authors familiar with the teachings of Paul...? Absolutely.

spamandham · 04-24-2009, 07:06 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Doug Shaver

I don't know of a good metric for parsimony. It seems to be at least partially a matter of personal intuition. I hope you will concede that reasonable people may have differing intuitions.

Reasonable people can certainly come to a different sense of parsimony, but hopefully, those same reasonable people will agree that they could easily be wrong. Though I lean toward the idea that all the letters are pseudopigrapha, I might be wrong.

It's proper to recognize that positions based on parsimony, where there is not *a lot* of difference in degree of parsimony between various positions, are extremely weak.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Doug Shaver

My hypothesis calls for a real Paul and one or more forgers. There are known historical analogues for this situation. It has happened several times, and my hypothesis presupposes nothing that is not applied in those other cases.

Your position is possible, but there are also lots of historical examples of people just making stuff up from whole cloth, so that idea is not far fetched either.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Doug Shaver

Your hypothesis calls for two or more forgers, one of whom had to invent the person that he was pretending to be.

My hypothesis leans on the idea that Paul was a pre-existing known legendary hero of some kind (possibly by a different name), including the possibility that he was a real person.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Doug Shaver

I'm not assuming that the apparently authentic writings were letters in the ordinary sense that were actually distributed to the ostensible addressees. The epistle style could have been just a literary gimmick, for all I know.

This is possible of course - I allow for the idea that subcultures are sometimes creative and come up with novel ideas, but is there good reason to think this is the case? If your hypothesis depends on such an idea, is your hypothesis really simpler?

Quote:

But in that case, it would hardly serve my purpose to pretend to be someone that my readership has never heard of.

Exactly. The readers had to have been familiar with a Paul character or none of this makes any sense. Even if the letters were genuine, no-one would care unless they were already familiar with the character Paul.

But if they were already familiar with the Paul character, then there is motive for fake letters attributed to him.

spamandham · 04-24-2009, 07:09 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by aa5874

Where is the Pauline writer a scatter-brained jumble-headed idiot in the letters?

Does it matter? If I went to the trouble of presenting a dozen examples to you, you would not budge from your current position in the slightest.

spamandham · 04-24-2009, 07:26 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by kcdad

Were the Gospel authors familiar with the teachings of Paul...? Absolutely.

That's an interesting claim. What do you base it on?

aa5874 · 04-24-2009, 08:41 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Doug Shaver

My hypothesis calls for a real Paul and one or more forgers. There are known historical analogues for this situation. It has happened several times, and my hypothesis presupposes nothing that is not applied in those other cases.

Your hypothesis calls for two or more forgers, one of whom had to invent the person that he was pretending to be. I am not aware of any other time in history when this has happened. If you're assuming something about Christian history that nobody assumes about all the rest of human history, then I think that's one too many assumptions.

But, what about the apostle called Peter?

Peter was a whole cloth invention and he is in the NT, in Acts of the Apostles and the Pauline letters.

Peter the whole cloth invention accomodated Paul for fifteen days. Paul claimed he went to Jerusalem to see the the whole cloth invention. See Galatians 1-2.

Peter, the whole cloth invention was with Paul in Rome. Peter the whole cloth invention had arguments with Paul over the gospel of circumcision and uncircumcision.

But, the whole cloth invention also wrote epistles like Paul.

And Eusebius sensed something was wrong with letters from Peter.

"Church History" 3.3.1

Quote:

1. One epistle of Peter, that called the first, is acknowledged as genuine. And this the ancient elders used freely in their own writings as an undisputed work. But we have learned that his extant second Epistle does not belong to the canon........

The second epistle of the whole cloth invention called Peter does not belong to the canon.

The invention Peter becomes an inventor of an epistle, only in the NT.

2Peter 1.1. -

Quote:

Simon Peter, a servant and an apostle of Jesus Christ, to them that have obtained like precious faith with us through the righteousness of God and our Saviour Jesus Christ

Acts of the Apostles is about the whole cloth invention called Peter and Paul. Paul's inseparable companion, Luke wrote all the fiction about the whole cloth invention called Peter.

Now Paul is a whole cloth invention, he was with the invented in Rome, the same invention that saw the fiction called Jesus walk on water, the same invention that saw fiction transfigure, ascend through the clouds and was with the whole cloth invention who spoke in tongues.

It is in the NT. Two or more forgers that invented the persons that they pretended to be.

You must be aware of Peter and Paul.
You must be aware that history of the Christian Church was invented.

To be a good inventor, Paul was absolutely aware of the gospels and the whole cloth invention called Peter.

Paul advised the invented, Peter, about the gospels, he must have known it very very well.

Amaleq13 · 04-24-2009, 09:20 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by aa5874

"Paul" is consistent with the gospel story.

Not really and that's even after setting aside your continued use of "betrayed" rather than "delivered up" (with no necessary assumption of betrayal) when that choice of translation appears to be influenced, itself, by the Gospels. He has "Cephas" as the first witness to the risen Christ rather than any women and he refers to him as though he was not part of "the twelve". He follows that with a mass witnessing and a special mention of an appearance to James.

None of this is consistent with the Gospel stories.

The Gospels depict Peter as a leader of the twelve. The name "Cephas" only appears once (Jn 1:42).

The Gospels depict women (or a woman) as the first to witness the risen Christ.

The Gospels have no mass appearance to 500 nor an appearance to James.

Paul is not consistent with the Gospels.

But feel free to ignore this error just as you have every other one that has been pointed out to you and keep on preaching!! :thumbs:

DCHindley · 04-24-2009, 09:24 AM

WRT parsimony, a comic strip I read recently (Frazz, if anyone is interested) got me interested in the following quote which, although anecdotal, has a measure of truth to it.

“There is always a well-known solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and wrong.”
Mencken HL. New York: Knopf, Prejudices: second series. 1920 p. 158.

It is often paraphrased as: "For every problem, there is a neat, simple solution, and it is always wrong." For this discussion, it is more to the point. The sad fact is, sometimes solutions are messy and not very parsimonious.

DCH

http://comics.com/frazz/2009-04-17/ This comic is even funnier once you realize that the quote is the paraphrase, not what "the Man" actually said. The truth is a little deeper than what appeared on the page, and the author knew it. Fans of the strip would do the research to find what he was really getting at. The quote the kid is referring to is from Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum
http://books.google.com/books?id=clx...um=1#PPA308,M1

Quote:

Originally Posted by Doug Shaver

I don't know of a good metric for parsimony. It seems to be at least partially a matter of personal intuition. I hope you will concede that reasonable people may have differing intuitions.

bacht · 04-24-2009, 09:40 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Doug Shaver

I can accept that there might have been a charismatic rabbi like Jesus of Nazareth who was executed by Roman authorities on charges of sedition or some such. I don't think there was because I see what looks to me like compelling evidence to the contrary. I don't see similar evidence contrary to Paul's historicity...

There is no theory, and cannot be any theory, about Christian origins that does not rely heavily on speculation. The surviving evidence is just not sufficient to allow any of us to say that we know exactly how this religion, as we now know it, came into existence...

I don't look to any of the texts, canonical or otherwise, for data on what actually happened during Christianity's early centuries. I look to them for data on what Christians at various times and places believed had happened. Then I try to figure out, as best I can, whether they might have had good reason to believe it. On many points I often conclude that they did not, but then I'm asking myself why they believed it if it wasn't so. If I can think of a reason that doesn't presuppose somebody lying to them, then to my mind it's a plausible scenario...

Yes, the texts are all fantastic. To us, that is. But we're atheists. Of course we can't believe anything that's in them. They're all about what we should believe about some god. But we're pretty sure there is no god, so of course we're not going to believe them. But that doesn't make them lies. We atheists are outnumbered a hundred to one by people who honestly, sincerely, believe every word of that crap -- and that's without hearing it from anybody who knew that it was crap. Every modern believer has heard the crap from other true believers. If millions of people now can believe it without having been lied to, then what is so incredible about a few thousand people honestly and sincerely believing it during the first and second centuries without having been lied to?

I don't think we need to presume that all Christian writers are "guilty until proven innocent". But the case for the defence (historicists) has been throroughly explored over the years. I just think it's reasonable to "cross-examine" the authors from a skeptic angle (and no I'm not trying to emulate Lee Strobel).

I agree that there isn't much evidence for Christian origins, that's why discussions like this are possible (no "case closed" from the academy yet).

Obviously the NT writers take supernatural phenomena for granted, and their followers have ever since. Paul's story begins with a revelation of the risen Christ, which could easily be interpreted as hallucination or psychosis.

As for why people believe what they believe, then or now, the pop-psych answer is that people believe what they want/need to believe. If early Roman Christians wanted to believe in a heroic champion of the gentiles, that doesn't prove that such a person really existed.

Solo · 04-24-2009, 01:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Doug Shaver

Quote:

Originally Posted by spamandham

Ok. Why do you find "Paul was a historical person" substantially more parsimonious than "Paul was not a historical person"?

Obviously, either one can be stated with equal simplicity, but the parsimony issue does not concern the hypothesis itself. It concerns the number and plausibility of presuppositions required to support the hypothesis.

I have often had a feeling when people plead or invoke parsimony they are just being too modest. In this case, i.e. in deciding whether Paul was partially forged or fully invented, the call for parsimony as a measuring tool betrays a simplistic reading of "least complex explanation is better" as meaning "less differentiation is better".

Quote:

Originally Posted by spamandham
Do not the known pseudepigrapha, which are of a form similar to the "geniune" letters (letters supposedly from Paul to churches) not cast serious doubt on the authenticity of all the letters? Is it really more parsimonious to think there was only half fraud rather than full fraud?

Case in point: s&h asks anabashedly on the principle of parsimony why we should not throw the baby with the bathwater. Note the writer's use of 'supposedly' in reference to genuine Paulines. What gives rise to the doubt ? The answer is: the existence of pseudo-Paulines. With this logic, the mere discovery of a fake Picasso by the experts should be seen as a sufficient deterrent to buying a genuine Picasso certified by them.

Jiri

aa5874 · 04-24-2009, 01:44 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by kcdad

Quote:

Originally Posted by sugarhitman

To say that Paul was not aware of the Gospel, is the most absurd claim yet. I sense that this claim has been manufactured to support a later date for the Gospels. Because if Paul's epistles were in the hand of the churches certainly these letters did not precede the Gospels...that would have been backwards. So what Paul didn't go into details about Mary, and other accounts in his epistles....but neither did Peter, Jude, or James in theirs....why should they seeing the churches already had the Gospels.

You DO understand there is a difference between THE Gospel and The Gospels... right?

The Gospels are handwritten, human interpretations of THE Gospel. THE Gospel is what Jesus taught about the Kingdom of God and is retold somewhat in The Gospels.

DID Paul ever read a Gospel according to ______ ? No way.
DID Paul ever talk to followers of Jesus (or followers of followers of Jesus) and learn about Jesus' teachings...? Of Course.
Were the Gospel authors familiar with the teachings of Paul...? Absolutely.

Paul was absolutely aware of the gospel and the gospels.

Based on Irenaeus, Paul and the author of Acts were inseparable companions.

Paul and the author of Acts travelled together based on the sacred scriptures of the NT.

The writer called Paul persecuted the faith or persecuted those who preached the gospel.

Paul claimed he had revelations from Jesus but Jesus did not exist.

It is virtually impossible for Jesus in a resurrecrted state to have revealed false information to Paul.

In the gospel story Jesus was betrayed in the night after he supped with his disciples.

The betrayal and the last supper were fictitious events, yet Paul claimed the resurrected Jesus revealed fiction to him.

It should be obvious that Paul read or was aware of the betrayal story and gLuke's version in particular.

So, DID Paul ever read a Gospel according to ______ ? Of course. Paul had no revelations.

DID Paul ever talk to followers of Jesus (or followers of followers of Jesus) and learn about Jesus' teachings...? Of Course Not. Jesus was fiction.

Were the Gospel authors familiar with the teachings of Paul...? Absolutely NOT. Paul taught nothing in the 1st century.

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