Johann_Kaspar

Sorry if that question arose already: is there any mention of "Paul" outside the "church". I re-read Dubourg and he is completely convincing about a completely fictitious literary character. It is really funny to see so many people speaking about "Paul" as if he existed in real life. What a joke!

The Evil One

Even if there was no "historical Paul", we still need a label by which to refer to the historical individual who was the author of those Pauline epistles which appear to have a common author. "Paul" seems as good a label as any.

spin

You are correct to think that Paul is not mentioned outside the church.

There may not have been a writer called Paul (or Shaul), but some single person wrote a group of the letters attributed to Paul in a manner that shows a certain personality (which is not visible in the deutero-Pauline letters) with a certain view of the task he was doing, with his jealousy and manipulativeness. I'll call him Paul.


spin

CX

They're not just attributed to Paul. The writer says he is Paul. The question becomes why would someone make up the name Paul and use it as nom-de-plume before there was any Pauline tradition to warrant pseudepigraphy?

spin

That's basically my unstated though implied argument. This doesn't prevent a string of pseudonymous Pauline texts of course, but the core is "Pauline".


spin

secular buddhist

Is it possible that a single author wrote the Pauline epistles anonymously, and then the greetings from Paul were added later, after the tradition of the apostle Paul became established?

Al Kafirun

Huh. Interesting. Yet another angle for me to re-read the NT from.

CX

I suppose that's plausible, but it seems to me it runs afoul of Occams razor. Paul's career was not all that miraculous and the description is not especially implausible so adding a layer of complexity such as you propose above seems unwarranted.

The Evil One

Of course, one must be careful that accepting the existence of a historical Paul is not interpreted by christians as accepting the biography presented in Acts.

rlogan

I am not familiar with Dubourg. Perhaps you could share with us a little more please?

If we start with the most credible position of no Jesus, then there were no disciples, and that leaves strictly pseudo-apostles.

CX seems to have made a reasonable point. But if we're fabricating an entire body from the ground up then we invent a name. We do have to imbue it with symbolic value.

So we start with a King (Saul - first King of the Israelites) but call him "little one" (Paul) in the service of God. Everyone at the time is hip to the image.

It doesn't pass the "smell test" now, does it?