long winded fool

Why couldn't this apply to Moses and/or Abraham?

sharon45

As I've pointed out many times, Judaism was originally intended for Jews only. The Tanach had much of its writings stolen and corrupted in what is known as the OT for christianity. Even though the Tanach had many fail-safes included to prevent such a thing from happening, it was done all the same out of ignorance. Without such an occurrence hardly anyone would be exposed to what is supposed to be Jewish belief only.

Also as I've pointed out, in Jewish belief, even if it were completely proven that all of the Tanach/OT was all made up and not anywhere near what happen in history, this would not really change Judaism at all. But, this would have drastic effects on the other religions that abused Judaism to create theirs.

I'm not in anyway excusing what is supposably Jewish teachings and history as being correct or moral to others outside the belief. I am stating, since Jews throughout their history, have most of the time, been victims of others and of themselves, they wouldn't have been near responsible for history's later and much greater offensives against people.

spinoza

Curiously, in terms of following "Jesus" or "Paul," I've always thought that anyone that actually calls themselves a "Christian" missed Jesus's point, and therefore must be a follower of Paul rather than Jesus.

sharon45

I find much more curious as to why even jesus missed so much of his own 'points'. With paul, without really knowing about what jesus had ever said, thought himself to write so much on the subject all the same. They both are considered as different, yet they do have some very glaring similarities most overlook.

Mathetes

I personally do not understand this current trend of modern Christians to somehow defend that Jesus teachings were cool, but they were somehow corrupted by Paul. I personally think it is the other way round: the gospel writers changed a lot what the original Christianity meant.

We may never know very clearly what Paul believed in, but he has a lot more authority to describe us the original ideas of the Christian church than the gospels, because:

- His writings are signed by him, so at least we know the basics of who he was: a preacher of Jewish origin that converted and wrote to Christian churches around 50-60 AD. This constrasts with the gospel writers, of whom we essentially know nil (other than "Eusebius read that Papias heard that a presbyter told that Mark wrote something").

- His writings are by far the closest we have to the alleged time of Jesus, dated around 50-60 AD, contrasting with the gospels, that have no clear dating, and scholars situate them in a large range between 70-110 AD! In the best case, a lot of years after Paul.

- It can be shown that the gospel writers ammended and altered sayings and deeds of Jesus in certain circumstances, most likely for socio-political reasons.

So how can it be defended that there were some initial Jesus teachings that Paul changed for his own reasons? Jesus sayings were recorded much later than Paul's letters! Paul is by far the best witness to the earlierst Christian ideas that we have.

The gospels are much later documents, and consequently more unrealiable. They can only be rendered as witnesses at a second level. If in doubt about a particular teaching of the early church, I think common sense dictates that we should take Paul's opinion first, and the character Jesus of the gospels second, because this character is a literary construction presented after much more time of evolution and change!

Rational BAC

But then again you have to realize that Paul--

Never even met Jesus, never heard personally one word that He spoke.

And Paul just seems to me to bring his own personal feelings into whatever he wrote about Jesus. So much in the letters of Paul seem to be the result of very late nighters ---just trying to come up with something--- ANYTHING--- to expand the church.

And if he wasn't doing that then it is obvious at other times that he was just seemingly pulling things out of thin air off the top of his head things that had nothing at all to do with the words of Jesus. His writings seem to me to be the result of a compete egotist who just knows he is right no matter what anybody else says. Reminds me of a drill sergeant.

The Gospels although written down much later, did carry on and write down what I assume was a fairly accurate oral tradition, certainly errant and most probably corrupted with time and political influence--will grant you that--- of some sort portraying Jesus as He lived and talked.

Now the question, or the answer is---you can read the Gospels and decide for yourself what Jesus was all about --

In other words pretend you are Paul. You are as good an interpretor of Jesus as any damned body. Paul was an obvious ding-a-ling (at least in my estimation). So why should I decide that Paul (who never personally met or talked to Jesus, at least in the real world) should be able to decipher anything more than myself---who has also never talked to the living Christ? But can try and make do with the Gospels as errant as they are.

I trust myself much more than Paul. I actually like sex.

Mathetes

Never did the gospel writers, as 90% of current Christian scholarship admits. Actually, not one of the writers of the New Testament books ever met Jesus.

Just like the gospel writers. Only Paul wrote a lot earlier than them. And at least we know who Paul was.

...with zero evidence to support it. Sayings of Jesus in different gospels are changed to suit different agendas and theological thinking. These guys were writing the story of a guy 40 years after the fact in the best case! Imagine if I wrote down today the deeds and sayings of a guy in the 60s that I never met, and that had been passed from one person to the other by word of mouth. Would you trust it? I don't think so.

Reading your posts, I know that you like to pick and choose the bits you believe in. That may be fine for you, but for me, common sense dictates that we should rely more in the closest witness, even if we sympathize more with the latter.

Rational BAC

But Paul was not a witness in any way.

Just a guy who had a very strange delusion one day and as a result both expanded and corrupted Christianity.

I say I can interpret Jesus better than Paul. Why not?

Mathetes

But your knowledge of Jesus comes from a source that is a lot less reliable than Paul by any objective standards. You are not interpreting Jesus against Paul. You are interpreting Mark against Paul (if Mark was his name). We know who Paul was, and we know he was writing around 50 AD. We do not have a clue of who Mark was, he probably never lived in Palestine, and the earliest he wrote was 70 AD.

If instead of Mark you rely on Matthew, Luke or John you are even more distant in time from the real Jesus. John may have written around 100 AD (this is very arguable, though).

The Jesus that you are "interpreting" may be totally different from the real Jesus, and there is no way you can know.

Gawen

This is not really an answer to the OP and I'm afraid will muddy the waters more than it should. But the following is how I, in part, see 'Paulinism'.

Paul has been accepted as not only the greatest apostle of Christianity, but in a sense also the author of its theology. It is generally admitted that the epistles bearing the name of Paul are among the oldest apostolic writings. They are supposedly older than the gospels. Therefore when Paul was preaching, the four gospels had not yet been written. From the epistles of Paul, we learn that there were in different parts of Asia, a number of Christian churches already established. Not only Paul, then, but also the early Christian church was in existence before the gospels were composed. It would be natural to infer that it was not the gospels, which created the church, but the church, which produced the gospels. There was, in the beginning, a church without a book.

In comparing the Jesus of Paul with the Jesus in the gospels, they are not the same persons at all. Paul knows nothing about a miraculously born savior. He does not mention a single time, in all his thirteen epistles that Jesus was born of a virgin, or that his birth was accompanied with heavenly signs and wonders. He knew nothing of a Jesus born after the manner of the gospel writers. It is not imaginable that he knew the facts, but suppressed them, or that he considered them unimportant, or that he forgot to refer to them in any of his public utterances. Today, a preacher is expelled from his denomination if he suppresses or ignores the miraculous conception of the Son of God; but Paul was guilty of that very heresy.

Is it beyond doubt that in Paul's time the story of Jesus' birth from a virgin and the Holy Ghost/Spirit, which has since become cardinal dogma of the Christian church, was not yet in circulation? Jesus had not yet been Hellenized; he was still a Jewish Messiah whose coming was foretold in the Old Testament. If Paul knew what the gospels tell about Jesus, he would have, at least once or twice during his long ministry, given evidence of his knowledge of it. The conclusion SEEMS inevitable that the gospel Jesus is later than Paul and his churches. Paul stood nearest to the time of Jesus. Of those whose writings are supposed to have come down to us, he is the most representative, and his epistles are the first literature of the new religion. And yet there is absolutely no single hint or suggestion in them of such a Jesus as is depicted in the gospels.

It seems Paul is not only ignorant of the gospel stories about the birth and miracles of Jesus, but he is equally ignorant of the teachings of Jesus. In the gospels Jesus is the author of the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord's Prayer, the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the Story of Dives, the Good Samaritan, etc. Is it conceivable that a preacher of Jesus could go throughout the world to convert people to the teachings of Jesus, as Paul did, without ever quoting a single one of his sayings? Had Paul known that Jesus had preached a sermon, or formulated a prayer, or said many inspired things about the here and the hereafter, he could not have helped quoting, now and then, from the words of his master.
If Christianity could have been established without knowledge of the teachings of Jesus, why then, did Jesus come to teach, and why were his teachings preserved by divine inspiration? But if knowledge of these teachings of Jesus is indispensable to making converts, Paul gives not the least evidence that he possessed such knowledge. But the Apostle Paul, judging from his many epistles to the earliest converts to Christianity, appears to be quite as ignorant of a miracle flinging Jesus.

If Paul knew of a miracle-working Jesus, one who could feed the multitude with a few loaves and fishes, who could command the grave to open, who could cast out devils, and cleanse the land of the foulest disease of leprosy, and perform many other wonderful works to convince the unbelieving generation of his divinity, is it conceivable that either intentionally or inadvertently he would have never once referred to them in all his preaching? Is it not almost certain that, if the earliest Christians knew of the miracles of Jesus, they would have been greatly surprised at the failure of Paul to refer to them a single time? And would not Paul have told them of the promise of Jesus to give them power to work even greater miracles than his own, had he known of such a promise? Could Paul really have left out of his ministry so essential a chapter from the life of Jesus, had he been acquainted with it? The miraculous fills up the greater portion of the four gospels, and if these documents were heaven-sent, it means that they would be too important to be left out. Why, then, does Paul not speak of them at all? One reasonable answer is: A miracle-working Jesus was unknown to Paul.

Yet Paul, the first missionary, did the very thing which would be inexplicable in a modern missionary. It has been hinted by apologists that Paul's specific mission was to introduce Christianity among the Gentiles, and not to call attention to the miraculous element in the life of his Master, but this is a very lame defense. What is Christianity, but the life and teachings of Jesus? And how can it be introduced among the Gentiles without knowledge of the doctrines and works of its founder? Paul gives no evidence of possessing any knowledge of the teachings of Jesus. How could he, then, be a missionary of Christianity to the heathen? There is no other answer, which can be given than that the Christianity of Paul was something radically different from the Christianity of the later gospel writers.

Moreover, it is known that his fellow-apostles reprimanded Paul for carrying Christianity to the Gentiles. What better defense could Paul have given for his conduct than to have quoted the commandment of Jesus, "Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature." And he would have quoted the �divine� text had he been familiar with it. No, the other apostles would not have taken him to task for obeying the commandment of Jesus had they been familiar with such a commandment. It all goes to support the proposition that the �gospel Jesus� was of a date later than the apostolic times.

That the authorities of the church realizing how damaging the inexplicable silence of Paul, may be seen in their vain effort to find in a passage put in Paul's mouth by the unknown author of the book of Acts, evidence that Paul does quote the sayings of Jesus. The passage referred to is the following: "It is more blessed to give than to receive." Paul is made to state that this was a saying of Jesus. In the first place, this quotation is not in the epistles of Paul, but in the Acts, of which Paul was not the author. In the second place, there is no such quotation in the gospels. The position, then, that there is not a single saying of Jesus in the gospels which is quoted by Paul in his many epistles is unassailable, and certainly fatal to the historicity of the gospel Jesus.
Again, Paul himself was a zealous Hebrew, a Pharisee of Pharisees, studying with Gamaliel in Jerusalem, presumably to become a rabbi. Is it possible that such a man could remain totally ignorant of a miracle worker and teacher like Jesus, living in the same city with him? If Jesus really raised Lazarus from the grave, and entered Jerusalem at the head of a procession, waving branches and shouting, "hosanna", if he was really crucified in Jerusalem, and ascended from one of its environs, is it possible that Paul neither saw Jesus nor heard anything about these miracles? But if he knew all these things about Jesus, is it possible that he could go through the world preaching Christ without ever once referring to them? It is more likely that when Paul was studying in Jerusalem there was no miraculous Jesus living or teaching in any part of Judea.