MrMacSon

I don't think Earl put as much emphasis on the Pauline epistles as being primary as you say he does, maryhelena.

the key, especially if you take into account further editing and collating after the Pauline and Gosepl stories were put together, is

maryhelena

Methinks Earl might beg to differ....the mythicist position that he advocates is built upon an interpretation of the Pauline epistles....

gurugeorge

Yes and so do the gospels make that mix of Disciple and Apostle, so what? The point of mentioning the text was simply to show that there was at least one other tradition in Christianity where Peter and Cephas are thought of as two different people, so it's possible for the Paul tradition to have thought of them as two different people. This should be no great problem even for your reading - remember, it would be the same even if Paul was relatively late, as late as the EA itself. We're talking about the relative content of the Paul writings and the gospel writings.

And, to remind you, nowhere in the Paul writings is the word "disciple" used, nor is there any sense (apart from the thin, dubious thread of "Brother of the Lord") that any of the people Paul is talking about are claimed, by Paul, to have personally known Jesus. That's just an inference that everyone makes, presumably because, like you, they think that since both these writings happen to be in the same bundle of texts called the "NT Canon", the assumption is that they must be consistent.

But what if they're not, what if the "NT Canon" is a bunch of texts from different strands of Christianity, with different ideas of "Christ", that are jammed together and glued together by interpolation and a bit of forgery? Given major missing links like no "discipleship" in Paul, isn't that possible?

Calm yourself, it does nothing of the sort.

outhouse

While you can challenge the dating of he original Pauline epistles, you cannot do so with any credibility.

the dates I use are from unbiased scholars.


Apologist do not set historical values in scholarships followed today. If you want to dwell on mistakes made in the past you can. Most have moved on.

aa5874

The Epistula Apostolorum does NOT say the Apostle/disciple Peter was NOT called Cephas or the Apostle/disciple Cephas was NOT called Peter.

I have merely EXPOSED the fact in stories about Jesus that characters called Peter, James and John were Apostles/Disciples of Jesus and that it is claimed in the Epistula Apostolorum that those very Apostles/Disciples MET Paul.


So it is quite reasonable for you to infer that the Apostles Peter and James in the Pauline writings are different to the Apostles in the Gospel of the very same Canon which is contrary to every known apologetic writings about Paul and Peter but others are wrong to infer that the Apostles in the Pauline letters are the same Apostles in the Canon.

In gJohn, the Apostle Peter a disciple of Jesus is called Cephas so it is completely reasonable to infer that the Apostle Peter is the same character throughout the NT Canon.
So, you don't know what you are talking about. What if this and what if that is NOT evidence of anything. I am dealing with the TEXTS-- not imagination and speculation.

Well, I know the Epistula Apostolorum DESTROYS a Celestial Never on Earth Jesus and cannot ever be used as evidence that the Apostles Peter, James, and John were NOT also called disciples.

I will not stay calm while you promote unsubstantiated claims about the Pauline writings.

It is time FOR the Pauline writings to be EXPOSED.

The Pauline writings are totally uncorroborated as 1st century letters in the NT even up to the mid 2nd century and are historically bogus.

tanya

Thank you George, for your patience, here.
Sorry, I don't mean to come across as always disagreeing with you.

What you have written, is not wrong, or inconsequential, or off topic, but, in my view, you have offered only your opinion, not evidence.

You have provided a succinct rationale for accepting as valid the hypothesis of Pauline authorship preceding creation of the gospels.

I disagree with your assessment, and remain unpersuaded, and the point of this rejoinder is to urge you to reconsider your position, offering not "tone", or "expert" opinion, or Jewish euphoria following the death of Caligula, as a rationale for claiming Pauline priority.

Those may, or may not, be persuasive to someone as skeptical as I am, but, what I need is not "opinion", but data.

How do I know, with conviction, that Herodotus preceded (by several centuries) Diodorus Sicculus, who, in turn, lived and wrote historical texts a century, or more, before Plutarch?

Is my conviction about the dates of authorship of these three Greek authors, as fragile, and as tenuous, and as insubstantial, in your view, as my claim that your assertion of Pauline primacy rests upon the same hot air transporting the magic carpet of Baghdad?

Which sequence of gospels/epistles copies another? Athanasius? Eusebius?

Metzger, Bruce M. The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance.

I am firmly convinced that the supposedly unique sequence of texts presented in EA, offers no clue whatsoever, regarding the date of EA authorship. Misguided, indeed.

Thanks, George. Yes, in my opinion, that is possible. What, in my opinion, is not possible, is to claim dates of composition of various texts in this amalgam, based on the presence or absence of this word μαθητής Strong's 3101. I don't argue that this word is not found in Paul's writings, though it is found in Acts 20:1, and Acts is often cited in claiming historicist conviction for Paul's existence. I find Paul a purely mythical person, but if he really did walk the planet earth, I doubt that it was before the conclusion of the third Jewish Roman war, circa 135 CE. The point is that absence or presence of a single Koine Greek word in various texts, while perhaps having profound theological significance, is not persuasive in assigning a date of authorship. I do applaud you, for pointing this out, or for signaling the accomplishment of whoever first noted this omission from Paul's texts.

I think absence of the word μαθητής from Paul's epistles is noteworthy, but I don't accept it as evidence that Paul's texts preceded Mark's gospel, anymore than I accept (the false notion) that Plutarch's omission of the word heliocentrism indicates that he wrote before Aristarchus of Somos.

Duvduv

If the Saul/Paul story in the epistles and Acts is merely a cut and paste job , a composite of stories set up by the emerging church that believed in a first-century Jesus, then the story would have had no relevance to anything to do with a mythic Christ interpretation of those texts at all.

gurugeorge

There are two different names that aren't visibly applied to one person, it's as simple as that. There are quite a few possibilities as to why that should be, one of them is that it was a mistake. Another possibility is that it's a scribal error. And another possibility is that there was a tradition which thought of Peter and Cephas as two different people.

No, it's that both positions are inferences from some contradictory evidence. Which way you choose to go and is not mandated by anything in the texts.

Yep, it's reasonable, if you assume that the NT Canon isn't a patchwork quilt.

But you don't know the first thing about the texts, do you? You don't know who wrote them, or when. You are making up a story to fit the evidence (in ENGLISH TRANSLATION ONLY, no less), based on the notion that the NT Canon is consistent and not internally contradictory.

It's only with that background assumption that the "evidence" you put forward looks like evidence for your position. Well, that's possible, but there's nothing that compels one to think that way.

I prefer to assume as little as possible, and read the texts as they are as much as I can (including checking interlinear translations as much as I can, given that I don't know the primary languages by heart). And I certainly am not prepared to take Church tradition's word for it that the NT Canon is a coherent set of texts all about the same things.

And the consensus, amongst "liberal" biblical scholars at least, even amongst historicists, is that the Canon is a bit of a hodge-podge in some respects.

I understand that you believe that, and you argue well for it, but, just like several other people on the board, I'm not convinced.

The Pauline writings are TOTALLY corroborated as 1st century letters in the NT Canon because that's where they're placed in the Canon, they're represented as being from that time in the Canon. It's you who is bringing in arguments from silence in some Apologists and Church Fathers to deny that.

As I said, I'm not convinced the the silence about Paul in Justin and other writers (who are clearly proto-orthodox, concerned above all to uphold a claim to lineage going back to discipleship) is due to their not having heard of him, and not rather simply because they didn't like Paul's version of Christianity (which internally claims a lineage going back only to visionary experience, not just for Paul, but also for the Apostles).

I'm not convinced that you can lay as much weight as you do on arguments that depend on a prior acceptance that the NT Canon is internally consisent in terms of its purported characters and meanings.

Vorkosigan

LOL. Hardly. It merely states what Earl's opinion is.

gurugeorge

But the presence or absence of the word does suggest an earlier date, since it hardly seems likely that the Paul writings would have been invented late without that word, since it's so integral a part of the gospel Jesus story:-

1) We have scholarship generally assigning a post 70 CE date for GMark.

2) Discipleship is integral to the internal logic of the GMark story of Jesus, and the gospels that follow it (130-150 CE-ish); the theme of the ignorance of the disciples is integral to GMark, and the story of pre-crucifixion ministry is an integral part of the other gospels.

3) For whatever reason, the Paul writings have no discipleship. It's true that the omission could be due to chance or error, or some quirk of the Paul writer's theology or psychology, etc., but it's also possible that it's ommitted because the Paul writer had no sense of discipleship for the Apostles. If the Paul writer actually had no sense of the Apostles as disciples of Jesus, and actually didn't think that anybody personally knew Jesus before his crucifixion, that's a very different "story" from the gospel story, where discipleship is integral.

4) It's unlikely that a no-discipleship story would be invented after the discipleship story, since another version of discipleship story would be more natural to invent for people who already had a discipleship story in mind.

5) Therefore, it's likely that the no-discipleship story was conceived prior to the discipleship story (which pretty definitely appears post-70CE).

Now I agree with you about the dubiousness of the "Paul" character as he appears in the NT, particularly in Acts. But just in terms of the sheer content of the writings (their internal meaning - I keep forgetting the technical term for that, it's not "internal meaning" it's something else isn't it, I mean the meaning-meant-to-be-accepted-by-readers) the above seems to be an ok argument for relative creation in time.