(April 10, 2016 at 11:59 am)Jenny A Wrote: With the exception of Romans, his surviving letters were written to gentile communities not groups of Jewish Christians. Sudden great consistency with jewish myth was hardly reqired.
In Paul's writings, he puts a lot of effort into explaining why Xianity is in absolute consistency with the OT. He is constantly quoting the OT and constantly reminding his readers (mixed Jewish and gentile BTW) of the biblical meta-narrative. Consistency with the OT is non-negotiable for him.
Quote:But it isn't consistent. The trinity is not consistent with previous monotheist doctrine.
Paul's monotheism is completely compatible with C1 Judaism, because Paul lived and died as a monotheist. What changed under early Xianity was the understanding of what monotheism meant. In addition to the Pillar of Cloud/Fire, Burning Bush, Wisdom, Torah and Tabernacled Presence, the early church believed that God had also appeared in human form. One God, many ways to communicate.
Later church councils made things complicated, and “3 in 1” approaches tend to mislead.
Quote:The fact that a man lived preached and died has little to do with how he might be mythologized decades later elsewhere in in world.
Paul wrote, as you say, only 20 years after Jesus death, and as Paul points out, large numbers of eyewitnesses would have been alive (Peter etc). The accounts of the resurrection are a different genre of thing altogether to the legends around at the time. (For example, the birth-death cycle is...a cycle; whereas the resurrection was a one-off preview of the anticipated general resurrection.)
The NT is packed with OT references. There is little actual evidence of influences from other cultures.
