rhutchin

Given that the Jews largely rejected Christ, greater numbers of gentiles believed in Christ and Paul was specifically sent to the gentiles and wrote his letters to gentile churches, it is not difficult to conclude that Paul was a significant influence in the growth of the early church and through his letters continues that influence today.

rhutchin

...hypotheses...

And unproven.

TimBowe

Yea, I never said it was proven.

andrewcriddle

Scholem was a brilliant scholar but he probably dated the rabbinic references to Merkabah mysticism too early.

Andrew Criddle

rhutchin

Only because you could not, as much as you seem to want to do so.

You said, "It is clear that in Schonfield's hypotheses Saul of Tarsus considered himself to be God's Messiah."

You did not say, "It is clear that Schonfield thought that Saul of Tarsus considered himself to be God's Messiah."

In one you distance yourself from the conclusion; in the other you make it your conclusion.

Nothing in the Bible concerning Paul's actions or words supports the conclusion you seek.

aa5874

But the NT contradicts you. There were thousands of Jews who believed in Jesus according to the author of Acts of the Apostles.

Before Saul/Paul was converted by a blinding bright light there were well over 8000 Jews who believed in Jesus the offspring of the Holy ghost. And it was PETER that had the most influence on the early Church.

Peter preached to the men of Israel and had 8000 new converts in just two days alone. Peter was using his shadow to heal the sick very long before Saul/Paul saw Jesus when he was blinded by a bright light.

Ac 2:41 - Ac 4:4 - Acts 5.14 And even in Acts of the Apostles Paul was preaching to Jews, he went into the synagogues of the Jews sabbath after sabbath, and there is very little information where he went into the Temples of the Pagans on their day of worship to meet non-Jews.

Paul was also primarily preaching on the SABBATH and in JEWISH synagogues to Jews in Acts of the Apostles.
Now, how illogical can it be that Paul could have started Christianity while at the same was the one who PERSECUTED Christians.

It must be clear that based on the fiction stories that it was PETER who had converted thousands of Jesus believers long before Paul was made blind by Jesus or the bright light.

gurugeorge

aa, I have no problem considering these as possibilities, but I don't see any reason to think he was lying, and I don't find any reason to conjecture why his own words might be false.

As you point out, visions are common enough, we don't have to find an excuse for why someone might have not had visions when they say they had.

As to the classification of the ancient prophets - well, I think all that classification is probably pretty wonky anyway. I go by (a layman's understanding of) a contemporary view of psychology/neurobiology and the sorts of things that are possible for experience, and in that view, there's nothing so unusual about visionary experience such that you have to run to an alternative explanation (e.g. lying, conning people) when you see someone saying "I had a vision".

And I think that about 90% of the origins of religion, can be explained by this kind of experience: either someone has a lucid dream or a waking hallucination of the visionary type; or they have a unitive mystical experience. Although all we have as remnants to investigate historically are texts, the meat and potatoes of religion is in the kind of personal epiphanies described by William James in "The Varieties of Religious Experience", and the religious production of texts, and religions qua sociological phenomena and movements of ideas, are entirely secondary to that.

(As I've said before a few times - if it weren't for these kinds of experiences, there would be no such thing as religion, for it does not occur to the unaided common-sense mind to posit unseen, conjectured entities as causes, even with our natural anthropomorphism.)

Solo

Hi Andrew,
IIUC, Scholem believed the later Mishnaic references (mostly in Tosefta) to Merkabah mysticism and esoteric angelology related to material which had tradition back to the time of the second Temple. Are you saying that the tradition probably did not go that far back ? If so, would there be some indicator in those references (which Scholem said were fragmented) to help establish their terminus a quo ?

Best,
Jiri

Doug Shaver

I agree that Paul's own writings fail to support the conclusion. The fact that those writings just happen to be in the Bible seems pretty irrelevant to me. But, it would seem that for some Christians, their inclusion in the Bible is the only relevant fact.

aa5874

But, it is the Pauline writer who challenges his readers. It must be that there was some reason why the Pauline writer swore by God that he was not lying. There must have been people who had reason to believe the Pauline writer was a LIAR over 1600 years ago.

But, these are the words of the Pauline writer. Paul himself had reason to think he did lie about the the truth of God.

Ro 3:4 -
Ro 3:7 - It would appear that the Pauline admitted that all men are LIARS and that he did LIE about the truth of God.

Ro 9:1 - 2Co 11:31 - .

Ga 1:20 - The Pauline writer swore by God and Jesus Christ that he was not lying when the very Jesus Christ that he swore by was invented after his supposed death.

But, on the other hand, it can be reasonable assumed that people can lie and have lied about having visions. Only the naive would ignore those facts.

People have been led astray, and have committed mass suicide because they failed to understand that people who claimed to have visions from Gods are very likely to be liars.

It can be successfully argued that many people lie about their visions from Gods.

Well, we have Joseph Smith and now we have millions of Mormons.

It would appear to me that supposedly religious people use "Visions from GOD" as a means to make people think that they are in "TOUCH with GOD" and that "God speaks to them" when their God cannot be proven to exist, and the person with the supposed Vision cannot prove the Vision itself is true and from a GOD.

There are differences between mystical experiences and visions from a God that supposedly lived on earth during the reign of Tiberius.

The Pauline writer is claiming that he met an apostle of the offspring of the Holy Ghost, the Creator of heaven and earth, and stayed with the apostle of the offspring of the Holy Ghost, the Creator of heaven and earth, for fifteen days in Jerusalem.

The Pauline writer is also claiming that he met James, the brother of the Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, Creator of heaven and earth, in Jerusalem.

The Pauline writer is a LIAR. The Pauline writer attempted to historicise fiction stories that were written after the very writer was claimed to be dead.

There was no entity on earth during the time of Tiberius and Pilate who was known to be a man and worshiped as a God by Jews in Jerusalem who had a disciple called Peter that was also preaching in Jerusalem after he was supposedly filled with the Holy Ghost and by some miracle became multi-lingual, that Jesus was the son of a God, and was raised from the dead and ascended through the clouds.

What we have in Acts of the Apostles and the Pauline writings are the products of fraud, the attempted historicisation of fiction, where the author of Acts attempted to historicise the Pauline writer by the pretense of being his contemporary and actually traveled all over the Roman Empire with him.

But, it is all over.

Acts of the Apostles has now been deduced to have been written long after Paul was supposed to be dead.

Why was not the martyrdom of Paul included in Acts of the Apostles?
Why was Acts of the Apostles ended as though it was written while Paul was still alive?

The Pauline writers are not at all from the 1st century before the Fall of the Temple.

Saul/Paul was not mad he was just invented.