Chili

He was just a bad egg just like Augustine in his time . . . but also had a good mother praying for him Is that so hard to beleive? (you don't really think that heaven is for nice guys do you?, ie. if you need 12 ousia's to make parousia it couldn't be!)

aa5874

First say exactly when Paul was converted. The bright light conversion in Acts 9 is fiction.

Gal1:23 - So Paul is claiming that he is now PREACHING the very SAME FAITH he destroyed.

There is ONLY one problem. Nothing in the Pauline writing can be corroborated by outside credible sources and sometimes even inside the NT.

When did Paul persecute what he now preach?

Chili

Exactly as I say it is . . . he was a lost sheep by running away from God = in essence putting his faith to the test as in 'raising the ax', if you will.

Remember here that the law was given to Moses to convict man of sin and thus not to stop sin . . . which means that the orgy must go on so we can be convicted as sinner. Hence, sin is good "as it aroused in me all kinds of evil desire" Romans goes on to say, etc.

So what is wrong with Paul having been a sinner until he got knocked off of his high horse?

DCHindley

As Toto noted, the phrase is

Galatians 1:13 For you have heard of my former life in Judaism [ioudaismos, the customs of the Judeans], how I persecuted the church of God [tên ekklêsian tou theou, the congregation of God] violently and tried to destroy it. 14 and I advanced in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people, so extremely zealous was I for the traditions of my fathers [tôn patrikôn mou paradoseôn, my ancestral tradions].

1:23 they only heard it said, "He who once persecuted us is now preaching [declaring as good news] the faith [pistis, belief] he once tried to destroy."

This word, Ioudaismos, is not especially common. It is also found in 2 & 4 Maccabees. I couldn't seem to get a hit on it at Perseus.org. It seems to have the meaning of "traditions/customs of the Judeans."

So, the writer of Galatians ("Paul") is asserting he tried to destroy a certain "congregation of God" (which suggests a defined group of individuals) which vs 23 equates with a system of belief.

Now I have long been saying that Paul was not a Christian, but had a completely unrelated set of followers in his peculiar interpretation of Genesis 15

6 And Abram believed God, and it was counted to him for righteousness (LXE).

His interpretation was formed after he had his revelation(s), previous to which he tried to destroy those who held beliefs he disagreed with. My spin on this is that it was a classic case of Hegelian thesis (strict observance of Jewish customs), antithesis (relaxed observances, maybe by gentile god fearers who do not fully convert), and synthesis (Paul's solution, that gentile God-fearers were children of Abraham solely on the basis of their faith that God would one day deliver his children to the promise land).

But silly me, Hegel is so out of style. It is, inconveniently, a correct way to understand the progression of ideas/solutions to dissonance. But there I go again, bringing up Leon Festinger's theory.

DCH

show_no_mercy

It's also odd how Paul uses "traditions of my fathers" when Josephus uses nearly the same formula to describe the (more liberal) Oral Torah of the Pharisees that the (more conservative) Sadducees rejected.

Cege

Acts 9 seems to describe Saul's persecution of the members of The Way, which appears to be the Christian sect before they were called "Christians".

Toto

1 Meanwhile, Saul was still breathing out murderous threats against the Lord's disciples. He went to the high priest 2 and asked him for letters to the synagogues in Damascus, so that if he found any there who belonged to the Way, whether men or women, he might take them as prisoners to Jerusalem.

Why should this be seen as historical? Paul claimed to be a Pharisee, but got a commission from the head Priest, a Sadducee, to go all the way to Damascus and arrest people (what was his jursidiction?) for something that does not seem to have been a crime. It's all very improbable.

Russellonius

Them:

Paul:

Paul continued to oppose the group at Jerusalem after his 'conversion'. He converted from violent opposition to oppositional rhetoric.

There were no 'Christians' at that time.

Russellonius

But the priests answered to the Herodian rulers by whom they were appointed.

Paul associated at Antioch with Menaen, foster-brother of Herod Antipas, the two having been raised together in Rome. Paul writes to the "household of Caesar" and to one named Herodion, "little Herod". The claim that Paul was a Roman citizen was considered credible by a writer. Herodians were Roman citizens. They were allies of Caesar.

John the Baptist's head got cut off over his criticism of the Herodian family. People were being killed, after all, and somebody had to do it. Why is it implausible that Paul might have been one of those people?

Have we not learned from Eisenman that Paul was Herodian?! The texts allow the possibility that Paul was among the social circle in which the Christ myth took shape.

It did not take shape among the followers of a historical Jesus. That side lost and it is not their version of the story that was preserved. It was the version of the victors. Victors write history. Never objectively.

Suppose they took the losing side's popular tale of the conservative prophet/martyr Jesus and made it turn out different. In a way that was more favorable to them. A risen Christ/God named Jesus who does not care anymore whether Jews continue to observe the ancestral customs. That would allow Drusilla's marriage to Felix, Roman procurator, to be no barrier to her salvation, unlike that of Herodias to Antipas earlier, before the resurrection. Problem solved.

Jason and Menelaus had the same problem 200 years before - conservatives just don't like change! - but they did not possess the marketing savvy of the scripture-mining proto-Christians. It's likely that the Hellenizing Jews in the first century learned from the mistakes of the earlier liberalizing ruling party in Jerusalem who lost to the Maccabees.

Drinking the blood, as Paul taught, is just as illegal as eating the pig that had been sacrificed on the altar in the Temple in Jerusalem two centuries before. Plus, it envisions decentralization of ethnic religious devotion away from the Temple, which was destroyed by Rome, allies of the Herodians, not much later.