judge

What it looks like is what we might find if two people translated the same verse from another language.
One person translated it one way and another translated it another way.
This variation is consistent with aramaic primacy

DCHindley

Gurugeorge,

I believe you can find examples where collections of ancient letters circulated with obvious and other not so obvious fakes or misattributed works included. Off hand I do not recall where I read that, but it may have been Books and Readers in the Early Church (or via: amazon.co.uk) by Harry Gamble. I recall examples of ancient writers complaining that students had at times published lecture notes worked up into a treatise of what the student (wrongly) thought the instructor would say if he were to have written on the subject of the book, or of altered copies of their actual works, or copies of early drafts of formally published books, drafts that were never meant for circulation.

As for how easy it might be to excise away parts of the canonical letters to leave a cohesive mystic/visionary/gnostic Paul, I don't think it would be as easy as you assume. Perhaps that is an observation as to what you think I have done with my own project.

To be honest, when I started at it about 30 years ago I was hoping to make sense of it all. As a young believer (in those days at least), I found reading Paul very confusing. In spite of being chock full of Christ talk that filled many a bible study evening, I just could never follow his lines of reasoning. I also had some romantic notions about Jesus, Paul and early Christian beginnings in general, which complicated matters.

At first I assumed the Christ talk was the core of Paul's theology, but it soon became evident to me that it was not presented in anything approaching a coherent fashion. Subject wise, he seemed to go first here, then way over there, and it appeared he was never finishing a thought. So I decided to try and read through individual books, and each time I encountered an argument about something I decided to read ahead and find places where the same subject gets picked up again.

What this processed revealed was that the only subjects that I could sew together into honest to god coherent arguments were about justification of gentiles apart from circumcision and the subsequent requirement to follow the Law. The surprising thing was that the intervening materials which seemed to get in the way were principally Christ dogma. It seemed to be in the form of commentary and a peppering of catch phrases such as "in Christ" "Of Christ" etc. In fact, all the Christ talk fell into this category.

I tried to reinterpret the data to see if I could manage to keep Jesus in the picture, such as imagining him as a wisdom teacher from which Paul drew inspiration, or as a messiah figure without the high christology, but I just could not do it. In the end, Paul resembled a Hellenized Jew of the Diaspora who worked within the client patron system that surrounded a well-to-do and wide ranging household, very likely a Herodian one. The Christ material seemed to emanate from one or more folks who were very familiar with Judaism, its holy books (in Greek) and its God, but at the same very angry at Jews themselves.

Since I feel that when the evidence is at odds with what you had assumed, you should refashion your assumptions, I was actually forced to come up with that crazy hypothesis where:

1) a fringe of the Jesus movement in Judea-Galilee and southern Syria, composed of gentile converts to Judaism, became disillusioned at their Jewish "brothers" and apocalyptic end times messianism (probably caused by the social divide created by the Jewish rebellion of 66-74 CE), and in response radically redefined their beliefs to fashion a divine redeemer out of Jesus, rejecting their conversions and repudiating the Law in the process,

and ...

2) a Paul movement, completely independent of any Jesus movement and which knew nothing of Jesus, consisting of gentiles who were worshippers of the Jewish God, who were either clients of, or slaves of, well-to-do Herodian households. Started and nurtured by Paul, a Hellenized Jew, to foster the notion that these faithful gentiles should be treated as brothers in faith by other Jews, it was left rudderless by his eventual death, and the decline of the importance of the Herodians, especially after the Jewish rebellion of 66-74 CE.

They both seemed to feel their faith in God was more important than circumcision or Law, and they were both affected by the Jewish war. That war was like the Rwanda massacres, the internecine strife between Muslims, Serbs and Croats in Bosnia, and WW2, all rolled into one. It polarized Jews and gentiles, creating intense ill-will on account of pogroms and massacres carried out by both parties all throughout southern Syria, Phoenicia and the former provinces of Herod the Great's former kingdom.

Jews responded to this, plus the loss of the sacrificial system, by either regrouping into rabbinic Judaism, or transforming into Gnostics (who rejected their former faith in the traditional Jewish God, redefining him as evil and ignorant, with a true pure Godhead to whom they aspired). Gentiles associated with Judaism (like Paul's friends) and gentile converts to Judaism (like those associated with Jesus' brand of messianism), responded similarly, redefining themselves and eventually finding common cause and creating Christianity as we know it today.

Now, back to reality everyone ...

DCH

gurugeorge

Tell me aa, do you think this:-



Is a duck that happens to look a bit like a rabbit, or a rabbit that happens to look like a bit like duck?

It's the same EVIDENCE in both cases - just some marks on (well, virtual ) paper.

aa5874

This is exactly what happens when you are fixated on only part of the whole.

If you use the available evidence external of the Pauline writings you will get a better look at the Pauline picture.

When you look at the Pauline writings through the Synoptic lens you get a DUCK.

When you look at the Pauline writings through John's Revelation lens you get a DUCK

When you look at the Pauline writings through the lens of Justin Martyr you get a DUCK

Now, the close companion of Paul was supposedly a physician, I mean a "QUACK".

We have more DUCKS than we can handle.

avi

Great humor, excellent response, laughed and laughed again.

Thanks for making a gloomy day, a little bit brighter.
avi