-Jay-

Toto's point was that:

1) We have letters. They were obviously written by someone.
2) We can call the writer "Paul"
3) Q.E.D. "Paul" wrote the letters.

That's a much different statment from declaring that "Paul, the narrative voice within the letters, actually wrote them."

It's trivial to declare that "Paul" wrote the letters, just as it's trivial to declare that "Mark", "Matthew", "Luke", and "John" wrote the Gospels.

regards,

NinJay

aa5874

And to maintain the confusion, there are those who claim that these letters are "authentic" even though they cannot determine who wrote them and the original contents.

andrewcriddle

I don't think the cases are parallel. The letters claim (rightly or wrongly) to be written by Paul, the Gospels don't claim to be written by their traditional authors.

The claim that Paul did not write any of the letters implies either that the author of the letters invented Paul as the purported author or that the letters were attributed by the real author to a genuine Paul in the absence of any tradition that that Paul wrote letters worth preserving.

Neither view is IMO particularly plausible.

In the case of the Gospels there is a much more straightforward possibility that in at least some cases authors were attributed to anonymous works by more or less guesswork.

Andrew Criddle

jeffevnz

The entire book consists of profound, unsupported, and highly improbable claims, being made by someone we have no reason to trust, who says he got these ideas from an unusual and notoriously unreliable source: visions in his head.

Sheshbazzar

Although there might have been an an actual Jewish traveling preacher in the beginning, I tend to believe that the "Paul", as "he" is presented to us within the NT is mostly only a clever ecclesiastical fabrication, a "character" that was employed by various anonymous writers to promote their own religious views and goals, and to give a semblance of a real history and lend a air legitimacy to the claims they employed in their power grab.
For many reasons I would date them to be of far latter composition than what is commonly arrived at by an uncritical acceptance of their claims.

The ghost writers wanted to convince everyone that the Pauline Letters were much older than they actually were, and succeeded quite well for as long as they were read and accepted uncritically at face value as being what they purported to be. We ought not to remain so naive, or allow ourselves to be so easily hoodwinked.

Solitary Man

It's an apocalypse...and Genesis is myth.

jeffevnz

I apologise if this is just a miscommunication... In case English is not your first language and you're not familiar with the expression, to call something baloney (or, more correctly, bologna) is to say it is false or nonsensical.

-Jay-

That's a reasonable point. In attempting to clarify Toto's point, I may have merely added to the confusion. The way I parsed Toto's comments, they depended only on the fact that there are letters and that letters must have an author. The content of the letters wasn't involved. In retrospect, I may have oversimplified. Toto - if I misrepresented your point, I apologize.

My statement was:
I didn't intend to assert that Paul didn't write any of the letters. I'm drawing a distinction between "Paul" the author and "Paul" the narrative voice within the letters. In drawing this distinction, I raise a third possibility - "Paul" the person was real, but some or all of the content of the letters are fictions or embellishments.

I concur, although I'd word it more strongly.

regards,

NinJay

Solitary Man

But it's not if understood in it's proper context. It's when you remove it from it's context and try to recontextualize it in terms of modern understanding and mores that the text becomes "baloney"). Or, in other words, modern recontextualization is baloney. Let the text remain itself.

jeffevnz

The problem is that it purports to make predictions, and those predictions either come true or they don't. There's no third possibility. Whether or not those predictions come true is independent of the mores and understanding of the time they were written, and of the time when they are supposed to take place.

So that leads us to a critical question with respect to any particular prediction: what, specifically, is supposed to happen? Well, we can answer that by taking the text literally, in which case most of the predictions have either failed, or appear very unlikely to happen. Or, we can open the door to allegorical interpretations. In that case, even if we charitably grant that the writer has real knowledge of the future, we won't know for sure what the predictions actually mean, except in retrospect. That renders them useless. As a physicist would say, they're "not even wrong."