RE: Would Jesus promote punishing the innocent instead of the guilty?
August 25, 2020 at 11:48 am
(This post was last modified: August 25, 2020 at 12:22 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
Quote:What can we reliably know about Paul and how can we know it? As is the case with Jesus, this is not an easy question. Historians have been involved in what has been called the “Quest for the Historical Jesus” for the past one hundred and seventy-five years, evaluating and sifting through our sources, trying to determine what we can reliably say about him.[i] As it happens, the quest for the historical Paul began almost simultaneously, inaugurated by the German scholar Ferdinand Christian Baur.[ii] Baur put his finger squarely on the problem: There are four different “Pauls” in the New Testament, not one, and each is quite distinct from the others. New Testament scholars today are generally agreed on this point.[iii]
Quote:1) Authentic or Early Paul: 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Romans, Philippians, and Philemon (50s-60s A.D.)https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/dail...ical-paul/
2) Disputed Paul or Deutero-Pauline: 2 Thessalonians, Ephesians, Colossians (80-100 A.D.)
3) Pseudo–Paul or the Pastorals: 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus (80-100 A.D.)
4) Tendentious or Legendary Paul: Acts of the Apostles (90-130 A.D.)
You might notice that quite a bit more than just the miracles in the story of paul is left out of authentic paul, and the claims of having experienced a miracle are left in - because that's not at all how these categories were determined. Trivializing the issues with the story of paul disrespects any attempt to study the most influential founder of the christian religion, and will cause endless rippling failures in understanding the development of that faith.
The consensus of academia is that paul, whoever he was, made those claims in category one - not that any of the claims were true (including claims to biographical detail) - and that categories 2-4 are...in effect...fan fiction.
The wiki entry, here...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_the_Apostle
....absolutely does go over this, at length - as does the eb link, here...
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sai...he-Apostle
.............................?
As pauls story is only tangenital to christian myth, I really have to ask how committed you are to throwing caution to the wind and getting into a doomed argument over the credibility of paul as presented in the nt? It's a theological treatise, not a biography. Which is fine , OFC, as it's very obvious purpose is to communicate the story of christ and christianity, not the details of a mans life. It does this well enough, with paul as narrrator - but it would be naive of us to insist that the details of the narrator have not been made convenient to the purpose and requirements of the story. Just as naive as it would be to insist that authentic paul is captured and preserved correspondence between himself and any other person...rather than a collection of polemics.
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