(November 18, 2021 at 6:58 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote:(November 18, 2021 at 11:33 am)Anomalocaris Wrote: The combination of megalomania and narcissism? A desire to portray how he would like himself to be seen as an objective authoritative fact rather than a mere claim? That an hagiographic account of a person known to be very full of himself is written in the third person is certainly no strong evidence that he didn’t write it himself. Caesar for example wrote of himself consistently in the third person in the Commentarii de Bello Gullico.
And yet Paul was a megalomaniac narcissist of the first water and wrote his Epistles in the first person.
Boru
Yeah, after having hallucinations.
That god spoke to Saul on the road to Damascus is a basic tenet of Christianity. Dude falls off his horse and later announces that god has spoken directly to him. Instead of at least making him go and lie down for a bit, that claim is tacitly accepted from then, to this day.
Were there no 'heretics' who seriously questioned*** Saul's claims?
Along with Joan D'Arc I've long thought Paul was suffering from a mental illness such as schizophrenia or epilepsy. As far as I can tell, the bunch of not-very-bright-illiterates who believed that shit were about as gullible as the more extreme literalists today. EG Ray Comfort, Ken Ham, Little Kirky Cameron and those who hang on their every word. .
***Eg "The bloke is unwell. Someone fetch him a damp cloth for his forehead" Same goes for a lot of stuff claimed of Jesus. One of my favourites is the woman taken in adultery. Jesus forgives her, using the earliest example of a Tu Quoque fallacy I've come across. In reality, the woman had been judged after breaking the law of Moses.. The penalty was death. Had Jesus interfered and had the gall to forgive her, he would have almost certainly joined her to be stoned, for blasphemy. It's that event, with others, which has led me to think that those who wrote the gospels were so ignorant of Jewish custom and law that they were probably not Jewish.