Paul's Lack Of Knowledge Of An Earthly Jesus

[Kris]

But couldn't "brother of Jesus" also mean spiritual brother?

[mymistake]

 

 

 

The "historicity" of people in the NT is based on a misunderstanding of what type of literature it is. It is not history. It is theology...

...The letters, which are not letters, were written in the mind of the Prophetic books and Deuteronomy, though updated somewhat with some Philo, Seneca, and Dio Chrysostom  influence. It's puzzling why they don't go into more detail about the supposedly historical Jesus if they were written after the gospel, but lots of things Christians wrote into the third century barely mention the "life and teachings" of Jesus. 

 

I agree with your approach. I have some more questions... was the OT written before the NT?  If so, why was the NT written (was the OT insufficient, and why?

 

 

The NT was written because Gentiles had formed a new religion based on the Jewish religion. They had to invent a new "patriarch," i.e. Jesus, since they could not use Abraham, nor could they use Moses. 

 

 

That explains a lot.  Why did these Gentiles want a new religion?  Were there geopolitical needs to be met?

 

 

 

 

 

Christianity is a religion of the poor.  It makes poor people happy and it tricks them to give what little they have to the pastor.  Christianity took root because it is invasive and enduring.  It does very well in regions that are already pagan.  These quality made it useful for Rome.

[Blood]

 

 

 

The "historicity" of people in the NT is based on a misunderstanding of what type of literature it is. It is not history. It is theology...

...The letters, which are not letters, were written in the mind of the Prophetic books and Deuteronomy, though updated somewhat with some Philo, Seneca, and Dio Chrysostom  influence. It's puzzling why they don't go into more detail about the supposedly historical Jesus if they were written after the gospel, but lots of things Christians wrote into the third century barely mention the "life and teachings" of Jesus. 

 

I agree with your approach. I have some more questions... was the OT written before the NT?  If so, why was the NT written (was the OT insufficient, and why?

 

 

The NT was written because Gentiles had formed a new religion based on the Jewish religion. They had to invent a new "patriarch," i.e. Jesus, since they could not use Abraham, nor could they use Moses. 

 

 

That explains a lot.  Why did these Gentiles want a new religion?  Were there geopolitical needs to be met?

 

It wasn't really that new, actually. Gentiles had been converting to the YHWH religion for hundreds of years. What was new was their independence from Jewish authority, and that accelerated with the three Roman wars. 

 

All you need to start a new religion is to find people disaffected with their current religion. The Gentiles converting to Christianity were disaffected with the other religious choices of their time and place. Nothing unusual about that. 

 

The political aspect of it is that they refused to participate in the Emperor cult. This made Christianity dangerous and edgy. You joined it knowing there were huge risks involved, but that also typically engenders a rebel pride. They were the rebels who weren't going to kiss the Emperor's ass. 

[HolyShit]

I've found this guy's posts an excellent resource for anything Jesus related. http://www.quora.com/Tim-ONeill-1/Jesus/answers#!n=50

"The earliest account is in Paul's first letter to the Jesus sect community he founded in Corinth, written some time in the 50s AD:

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born. (1Cor 15:3-8)

The first thing worth noting here is that fact that Paul includes himself in his list of those to whom the risen Jesus "appeared". Both his references to his encountering the risen Jesus and the three (slightly different) description of this encounter in Acts all make it clear that this was a vision - a light from heaven and a disembodied voice - not an encounter with a physically-revived former corpse returned to life. The verb Paul uses for all these appearances he mentions is the same one - ὤφθη meaning "appeared, was seen" - in each case. He makes no distinction between the appearance of Jesus to him and the appearances to others.

Paul then goes on to scold some of the Corinthians for saying there was not going to be a general resurrection of the dead - as already noted above, this idea was not universally accepted by all Jews and it seems to have become disputed in the Corinthian community of the Jesus sect. Paul asks "if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?" (v. 12) and goes on to call Jesus' resurrection "the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep", ie the pre-figurement of the coming general resurrection. He goes on to address the question of whether this coming resurrection will involve the rising of physical bodies and says in response "How foolish!". Then he goes on to explain that the coming general resurrection will not be physical but involve "spiritual bodies". 

If Jesus' resurrection is the pre-figurement of the coming general resurrection of the dead, therefore, it is clear that for Paul his rising did not involve a physical body. This is why Paul's references to and insistence on the fact of the rising of Jesus makes no mention of the evidence of a physical revivification of his dead body that features in some of the later accounts: the empty tomb, discarded grave cloths, people touching Jesus, Jesus eating and his physical form flying up into heaven. For Paul, at this early stage of the development of the story, the risen Jesus is a spiritual concept involving visions, not physical encounters."

After reading other stuff he has to say on the matter I've concluded that the followers of Jesus were disappointed their

"messiah" died so they made up legends about him which became the gospels later on down the road.

[Blood]

If Paul was a real person, and his letters were authentic, that would be the exception in Biblical writing, not the rule. Given the fictional nature of everything else in the Bible, I think it's reasonable to assume Paul is also fictional, and the letters are merely literary. 

 

"For Paul, at this early stage of the development of the story, the risen Jesus is a spiritual concept involving visions, not physical encounters."

 

See the list above. Of the remaining 14 NT epistles, only two reference the physical life of Jesus. Therefore, such a silence cannot be used to date the epistles. We have no idea when 1 Corinthians was written. 

[Joshpantera]

Paul probably existed but here's a link to the idea that he may have also been a myth: http://truthbeknown.com/apollonius.html

 

It is odd that Apollonius and Pauls journeys are so closely related. Another issue is that Marcion apparently found Pauls letters during the 2nd century, mysteriously, and then leaned on them for his Gnostic belief's. It could have all been a spin on Apollonius of Tyana. And if there was an historical Paul then it seems pretty straight forward that he copied in some way ideas from the life of Apollonius and took them as his own. Or a priestly writer inventing the character of Paul based on Apollonius who was interested in putting a front man to the cause of merging Judaism with pagan gentile beliefs could have been behind it all. And the comparison chart between Jesus, Paul, and Apollonius is certainly interesting for whatever it's worth. 

 

The Earl Doherty material is a must read if you're interested in early Christianity and how it evolved from spiritual and mythical ideas to concrete historical claims much later. He's dissected the NT in order of the writings appearances and then separated the authentic Pauline epistles (or believed to be authentic by consensus). And then you see what emerges from that type of focus and how the belief's layered on over time, becoming more historical sounding later rather then from the outset. Richard Carrier further's this line of argument as well.

 

There seems to have been a lot of different jewish-like sects focused on Gnostic and spiritual ideas around the turn of the century. This stems right off of things like Philo of Alexandria. Hellenized Jews were playing around with Jewish scripture and the result seems to have been a merging of pagan ideas like the solar and organic life myths of death and resurrection with the Jewish ideas of an anticipated messiah. Some historical people have have been used to color the myth making and many existing mythic ideas were used, Jewish mythological and Pagan mythological....

 

Happy Easter everyone! 

[Blood]

The travel itinerary of Paul is certainly hard to figure out. If it based on Apollonius of Tyana, it would have to be an earlier source than Philostratus's "Life," since that's from the third century. Apollonius also had fake letters attributed to him. He may be another example of a mythical figure given a "life" later for polemical reasons. 

[Joshpantera]

The mythological rabbit hole may run deep with that in mind. 

[Adam5]

If Paul was a real person, and his letters were authentic, that would be the exception in Biblical writing, not the rule. Given the fictional nature of everything else in the Bible, I think it's reasonable to assume Paul is also fictional, and the letters are merely literary. 

 

Hi, I think what lends some credence to Paul's letters is that they are written in the first person, and the style of writing is sometimes angry and scathing in tone.  Yes they did surface in the 2nd century out of the blue, but I would think it likely it relates to an actual person.

 

Even if they were all fakes, from the early 2nd century, it is still revealing that early Christians did not have a clue who the gospel Jesus was.

[Adam5]

I was doing some research on Paul, and found this an interesting comment:

 

" The first is to list out the documents which we have no reason to assume to be unauthentic. These would generally include the Romans, I and II Corinthians and Galatians. So when it is argued that some of the other documents are not authentic Pauline, what is meant is that the differences in style, form and content give us strong reasons to believe that they were written by someone other than the person who wrote Romans, I and II Corinthians and Galatians."  rejectionofpascalswager

 

 

So out of the 13 letters attributed to Paul, only 4 have the same style, form and content.  The rest are disputed by secular scholars as inauthentic or possibly inauthentic.  "Perhaps the most conclusive results of these computer studies is that the so-called Pastoral Epistles (I & II Timothy and Titus) are definitely non-Pauline." Wilson, Jesus: The Evidence: p131

[Adam5]

The Earl Doherty material is a must read if you're interested in early Christianity and how it evolved from spiritual and mythical ideas to concrete historical claims much later. He's dissected the NT in order of the writings appearances and then separated the authentic Pauline epistles (or believed to be authentic by consensus). And then you see what emerges from that type of focus and how the belief's layered on over time, becoming more historical sounding later rather then from the outset. Richard Carrier further's this line of argument as well.

 

I like his take on it too. I think his comments on the early Christian movement are spot on.  Paul, Peter and Apollos are rival apostles preaching a spiritual son of God Saviour based on personal revelations and old testament scripture.  In this early movement there is no historical Jesus just competing preachers with diverse messages based on visions and personal revelation.

 

"what Paul gives us is a familiar, timeless picture. He shows us a group of competing individuals in the passionate and unforgiving field of religious proselytizing, scratching and clawing for a bigger share of the market. They advance rival personal claims and attack one another's motives and qualifications; they are capable of going for the jugular. They are intolerant of opposing views. And they are all on a level playing field. None of them attempts any link to the man himself who is supposed to be the center of their message. No one ever draws a distinction along such lines." Earl Doherty

 

Point of interest the name Paul, like Apollos, is derived from Apollo the Greek sun god.  What a coincidence!

[mymistake]

I was doing some research on Paul, and found this an interesting comment:

 

" The first is to list out the documents which we have no reason to assume to be unauthentic. These would generally include the Romans, I and II Corinthians and Galatians. So when it is argued that some of the other documents are not authentic Pauline, what is meant is that the differences in style, form and content give us strong reasons to believe that they were written by someone other than the person who wrote Romans, I and II Corinthians and Galatians."  rejectionofpascalswager

 

 

So out of the 13 letters attributed to Paul, only 4 have the same style, form and content.  The rest are disputed by secular scholars as inauthentic or possibly inauthentic.  "Perhaps the most conclusive results of these computer studies is that the so-called Pastoral Epistles (I & II Timothy and Titus) are definitely non-Pauline." Wilson, Jesus: The Evidence: p131

 

Not only are the Pastorals non-Pauline but they are very short and in that tiny space they introduce concepts and words not found in any other non-Pastoral Pauline epistle.  They talk about Christian organization that didn't exist in the first century.  What is expected of an overseer and so on.  It's a late attempt to justify things that evolved later.

[Joshpantera]

"Point of interest the name Paul, like Apollos, is derived from Apollo the Greek sun god.  What a coincidence! "

 

That is interesting isn't it. 

 

Like I said, there probably was some type of Paul underneath it all. But even so his cosmic Christ could be seen as associated with the sun God in any event. The whole premise of a death resurrection comes from the pagan solar and organic life cycle myths. People get off saying that Paul spoke of Jesus dying and resurrecting but so what? It's well within the context of a myth. I can see how this primitive and less developed myth making was pointing toward solar attributes, which were then greatly intensified with the Gospel writing movement later.

 

And beyond that more and more layers of pagan belief were adapted until you get something like what we see in Catholicism where it's just bloody obvious that various pagan Gods were turned into Saints and they basically usurped the mythologies of every region of the world that they went into. Your gods are now our Saints. Pray to the same thing behind a new mask held now by us. 

 

It's like a little snow ball of usurping the solar mysteries and pagan religions that gained size as it rolled down through the ages....