Toto

You mean, except for having been written by them?

Toto

The glorifyhisname site seems to be down, but you can find google caches of the pages, e.g. here.

There is also a wikipedia entry for Brother_Lawrence with links to his work on project Gutenberg.

ynquirer

Frequent mention of details of Jesus’ life would have reminded the audience of the basic fact that Paul was not one of the chosen ones that met Jesus in his earthly life - bad strategy. Possibly, some of them remarked the fact time and again though their testimony has been lost. Was Paul likely to increase the leverage of those with whom he competed for leadership?

Read Martin Luther, who wrote a lot on church organization and very seldom mentions Jesus' life or the gospels - yet very often the epistles.

spamandham

An entire thread could easily be devoted to many of these points individually! But, I will address what to me seems the weakest point in the list.

While it's true they contain spiritual messages, they also contain ethical teachings, political positioning within the church, and personal requests. These are ripe territories for appealing to the authority of Jesus.

The possibilities as I see them, in order of increasing plausibility are:

0. Paul just didn't know or care about Jesus, and plugged his ears for 17+ years every time someone started to talk about Jesus.

1. All of Christianity is a fraud invented by Eusebius (threw this one in for mountainman)

2. Paul is a fiction invented by Marcion.

3. The historical Jesus somehow undermined Paul's ministry, and so Paul stuck to the more fantastic aspects that gentiles had generally heard of, rather than the undermining details they probably had not heard

4. Paul had never even heard of Jesus, and the texts were modified later by Marcion to apply Paul's spiritual savior concept derived from Isaiah 53 to Jesus.

5. Paul's historical Jesus is actually a character from the Jewish scriptures, renamed and syncretized with pagan ideas. Paul intentionally left out details of Jesus other than creedal aspects to keep his mystery hidden.

6. Paul only wrote about the creedal aspects of Jesus, even though he knew more, and never bothers to use the authority of Jesus on moral or political issues when it would trump, because Paul was peddling himself as a greater authority than the earthly Jesus

7. Paul's Jesus is either purely mystical, or a god incarnate from the indefinite past, rather than someone Paul viewed to have actually lived on earth within his own lifetime.

dog-on

Very interesting piece of writing, Ben. You do see the problem here, don't you? Let me, if I may, reword one of the statements;

That Paul did not mention an HJ cannot be used as evidence for an HJ.

There, fixed...

gurugeorge

In the absence of special knowledge about someone, you can only go by common sense. Common sense might look at Lawrence's text and say he's a mythicist. Because we have separate knowledge of Lawrence's true situation (that he's in a tradition that believes in the historical Jesus, and is claimed by his biographer to have been gung-ho about Jesus) we know that common sense would be wrong. Common sense might be making the same mistake with regard to Paul. But in Paul's case we aren't lucky enough to have anything outside the text to make clear to us that common sense would be wrong in the case of Paul.

See? There you go again! Outside knowledge of the true nature of Lawrence's situation that collapses the apparent ambiguity of what he says - something you haven't got in the case of Paul.

This is what I meant by circularity in the last post that I mentioned circularity in that I didn't really explain, which you quite rightly picked me up on. I glimpsed something there but I wasn't sharp enough to encapsulate it at the time. Thanks to your post it's become clearer to me (though I'm probably still not sharp enough to get it down right ).

By reading Paul with gospel glasses on, the assumption is made that Paul must have been silent because he was "a visionary/mystic who was uninterested in the gospel Jesus". This assumption is then fed back into counter-arguments against the relevance of Pauline silence, just as you have done.

But you have no warrant for being so cocksure about who Paul was and what he was like and what his circumstances were, such that you can claim that you have enough background knowledge to be sure that his case is analogous to Lawrence's; there's no comparable weight of obvious evidence about Paul's situation to enable you to be sure that had there been a gospel Jesus, Paul is the sort of person who wouldn't have mentioned him in his writings, even if he was a mystic.

Let's see if I can make it even clearer. The knowledge that Lawrence was a Carmelite lay brother and his biographer's knowledge about his devotion to the historical Jesus makes redundant any discussion of his psychology and about what mystics are and aren't likely to say given their beliefs. The fact is, you already know his belief (unless he was living a lie), and that's what enables you to say that, as a mystic, he's evidently uninterested in the historical Jesus (at least in his instructional writings).

But Paul's psychology is still an open question, because we don't have that kind of hard evidence - neither internally from unambiguous statements leading to historicity in Paul, nor externally from eyewitness accounts of a human Jesus.

Factor in proximity in terms of time and space, and the fact that there's an obvious brouhaha between Paul and apostles who supposedly knew a living Jesus, in which he would have had to justify his apostleship on merely visionary grounds as against their grounds of acquaintance with the living words of the cultic figure, and Lawrence becomes even less relevant.

Ben C Smith

Written by Publius, you mean... whoever that is.

Ben.

Ben C Smith

I agree with that statement, as I already stated in the OP:

Ben.

Dreadnought

Even apart from the difference of the times they lived in there is at least one glaring difference between Rutherford/Lawrence and Paul. Rutherfords/Lawrences audiences presumable had the same access to bibles and works on the bible as they themselves. Pauls audience had, as far as we know, nothing in writing, zip, nada, not a scrap.

dog-on

Ahh...not to prove an HJ, but of course, not as evidence for such a character either...

In other words, Paul can in no way be used to argue as evidence for an HJ due to the fact that he is silent regarding an HJ. I completely agree...