(September 13, 2017 at 2:40 pm)Khemikal Wrote: You must realize that, allowing for a moment the fiction of Paul - the act of "going up around there and teaching people" is what would have started christianity? How can we fail to appreciate a situation in which christianity had not yet been codified? What would the purpose of "Pauls", lol, "letters"...... be other than to effect such codification?
If Paul was teaching, and if Pual was acting as an arbitrator of accuracy in dogma...and if pauls are the works which survived and upon which christianity became based..........'
Then had some other person been teaching some other thing to some other group you could not xpect that the wheels of "history" would have yielded the same result. The centuries of rooting out heresy...on it's face, puts the lie to any such conjecture. As points of fact, other people were teaching other things to other groups of people. This is precisely what -necessitated- the pogroms in the first place.
What -you- believe about Paul and christianity is incoherent and self defeating.
I have no problem with Paul's function being to codify Christian living and being a very important figure in the early church. That in no way implies he made it up or he does not back up his reasoning at every step.
In addition, you are failing to distinguish the content of the epistles to those of the gospels. As far as the basics of Christ and his teachings, that was around for 20 active years before he started writing (15 chapters of Acts). The content of the gospels (although not yet written as we know them) were known and is easily sufficient for the first generation that actually experienced the events described (or knew those that did). As time passed, it became necessary for someone such a Paul to get at leas the application part down so that those new converts in far away places, who would never meet an apostle, had some guidance.
If not Paul, somebody would have had to. Would Christianity have been different? That is not apparent. We do not know if Paul reasoned out everything himself or if his years of training supplied the basic structure.
