Originally Posted by jon-eli

True. I may have jumped the gun there. My bad.


I tend to view Paul as an extra data-point whenever it seems useful to do so. I'm hopefully not transposing an interpretive framework for the Pauline epistles onto the gospels, but it's certainly possible that I am. Moreover, I wasn't actually paying any reference to the word "gospel," in that quote; I was really only interested it the Jew vs. Greek tidbit. (For what it's worth, I do happen to think that Mark and Paul meant "euaggelion" in the same way, even though that wasn't exactly my point.)

He may have repudiated it, but that seems to have been a tad reactionary. He was trying to get gentiles and Jews to coexist, but there was such great tension between the two that he was forced to shift more and more toward a middle ground. Think about the whole kerfuffle with circumcision, where gentiles were getting circumcised and Paul had to tell them to stop. Prior to Paul telling them it wasn't necessary, I suspect they were confused by the intrinsically Jewish nature of Christianity, and identified Christianity as a sect of Judaism (and therefore, what are we supposed to be repudiating? Ourselves?). This confusion had to have arisen from somewhere, and I bet it was with Paul himself (in the early stages, I bet he had a lot less vitriol for the Jews). He was forever confusing the people he proselytized, forever switching feet whenever he had to... as seen with 2 Thessalonians, which was clearly a response to confusion over his first letter. The point is (masked though it may be by my gibberish), Paul tailored his views to fit the situations that arose within the various communities... His theology evolved, and changed in light of the problems he encountered, and I think his repudiation was forced on him to some extent, by the realities he faced; I don't think it formed part of his original conception. And I think this counts in favour of a fairly pro-Jewish beginning to Christianity.

And yes, I apologize for making no sense whatsoever.