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My position cannot be overturned because it is based on the ACTUAL statements and recovered dated evidence.

When ONLY writings under the name of Paul are examined carefully we find an INCOHERENT chronology for the Pauline activities.

Effectively, there is NO way of knowing when writings under the name of Paul were composed.

From the very start all claims that the Pauline writings were composed Before c 70 CE and derived from Guessing, Imagination and Speculation.

For example, in Galatians 1 Paul claimed that After the resurrected Jesus was Revealed to him by God that he went to Arabia, and then after three years he went to Jerusalem.

When did these things happen in the Pauline letters??

What year did Paul go to Arabia??

We have NO CLUE at all in the Pauline writings.

Now there is NO author in the Canon that can corroborate that Saul/Paul wrote letters to Churches.

And even worse, the very Church and its writers did NOT know when the supposed Paul died.

1. According the Church and its writers Paul was Beheaded under Nero or BEFORE c 70 CE.

[u]Church History 2.25.5 Now, this is extremely important.

The very Church and its writers will EXPOSE that statements about Paul Must be Fiction.

The very Church and its writers claimed Paul was Aware of gLuke.

Church History 6.25The very Church and its writers have presented Fictional statements about Paul.

If Paul was aware of gLuke then he could NOT have died under Nero.

There is simply No corroborative historical evidence for Paul the Pharisee who preached the Revealed Gospel--Salvation by the Resurrection.

It would appear that Saul in Acts was NOT Paul of the Pauline writings.

Saul/Paul in Acts preached Baptism for Salvation.

[Acts It is clear that the Church and its writers did NOT know when Paul lived, when he died, what he actually preached, what he actually wrote and when he wrote them.

In Acts, One MUST be Baptized to RECEIVE the Holy Ghost yet the Pauline claimed he was NOT sent to Baptize.

1 Corinthians 1:17 KJV The Pauline writings and the Paul character were fabricated sometime in the 2nd century or later exactly as the recovered dated manuscripts show.

Even in Acts, the name Paul was added late.

James The Least

Nonsense.

The "letters" (which aren't letters) attributed to "Paul" have at least three different authors, and those two facts alone throw suspicion on the integrity of both the Corpus Paulinum as well as the historicity of "Paul" himself. This would be true even if we had reason to believe in the honesty and integrity of the early the church, but of course we have no reason for that either.

Fluency in the Septuagint (note: NOT Hebrew Scripture; the "three Pauls" cannot read Hebrew) is not prima facie "evidence" of anything other than fluency in the Septuagint. The three Pauls' gross misreading of those scriptures, and their misunderstanding of Pharisaic Judaism, have been noted by an army of Jewish scholars. The three Pauls are Greek Gnostic thinkers, influenced by Philo and Stoicism, using the most selective misreading of the Septuagint to argue for "Christ Jesus's" imminent return for the general resurrection.

Toto

Yes, you do. Here are some of the possibilities that have been argued by people who have read more than you:

Do you mean that the character Paul in Acts was fictional? Do you mean that the author of the epistles was not named Paul? Or that both the author was not named Paul and the claims in the epistles about himself are false? Do you mean that "Paul" existed but the epistles are all forgeries - and that Acts is fictional? Are you asking if the epistles were written in good faith to expound on theological points that the author believed were true, or if they were written as parody? What if there is an underlying set of genuine letters that have been extensively interpolated? Are you asking if the historical Paul was Simon Magus? Are you asking if Marcion wrote the Pauline epistles?

I see no indication that you understand the various theories of the historical Paul. I see no indication that you understand enough to formulate a coherent question.

James The Least

Since you show no sign of any critical evaluation of the arguments against the authenticity of the Corpus Paulinum, which are over 100 years old and well-documented, there really isn't much here to engage with.

Why should I believe the New Testament? It's written by a bunch of anonymous religious fanatics who thought their "visions" equalled reality, as one of the group of the Pauline writers admits quite proudly at 1 Corinthians 11:23-26. The difference between someone hallucinating the Last Supper and someone hallucinating the "good Jew" who repents of his evil ways on the Damascus road is vanishingly small.

TedM

Only those steeped in such doo-doo thinking would need clarity, but I'll give it to you. A 'fictional' Paul is one that says there never was a character named Paul who was anything like that understood and accepted by Orthodox Christianity for the last 2000 years.

Feel better now?

sotto voce

.... is exactly what follows. To the very end.

James The Least has been informed several times that authorship does not matter. The statement he sees fit to question implies this very fact.

He has also been informed that the NT could be deduced from the gospels and OT. Neither does the OT source text matter, as has also been mentioned recently.

What matters is content. What matters is resonance with the minds of those who selected, and who right now select the NT! Understand?

In several decades, nobody has been able to show significant new thought in all of the NT letters, thought that was not confirmation of OT lore. If any reader wishes to contest this view, then select a passage from any NT letter and demonstrate how it fails to reflect OT values. It is not impossible, but I suggest it will be difficult to achieve by random selection.

James The Least

I realize that arguments from personal incredulity are considered logical within the realm of Bible studies, since it isn't a reality-based discipline. But we are well past the era of accepting everything in the New Testament and related literature at face value, something you seem to be blissfully unaware of.

Characters in Bible stories may not be real???!!! Shock! Horror! Biblical "authors" may not be real either? Do you really mean to tell me that the Epistle of Jeremiah wasn't written by the historical Jeremiah??? And that there may not have even been a Jeremiah? Why would anybody lie about that?

sotto voce

We know that Orthodox Christianity is antichrist.

James The Least

No, I'm afraid I don't. So the authorship of the letters doesn't matter, only their content, and therefore if one, three, or fourteen people write letters that begin, "Hey, it's me your good buddy Paul," that's irrelevant to the historicity of Paul, because the people who selected said letters were ... what? Above reproach? Men of unquestioned integrity? Old buddies of Paul who knew he would have written something like Colossians, and therefore it's just as good as authentic?

sotto voce

No matter.

Ah! A book!

Now can we open it, and pick a passage that is not founded on the OT?

Gwan! You know you can do it if you try!