(October 4, 2023 at 4:20 am)LinuxGal Wrote:(October 3, 2023 at 11:24 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: These issues have been known and alot of ink has been spilt on them for over a century. Thus, it's grandstanding and not debating, imo, to pretend that mythicists are nuts - just because they agree with the consensus -about the character in magic book- but choose not to use the negotiated language of jesus nuts. Put another way, even the people who hold to a historic paul can (and often do) acknowledge all of this, and say..like bart ehrman is famous for with jesus..that even so, they still think there was some real boy that we know absolutely nothing about because of the circumstances of history and religious development. Let it sink in.
Jerome was willing to contract the account in Acts that Paul was born in Tarsus by relating a tradition that he was born in Galilee instead. The account also gives Paul's age, which fits well with evidence in Philemon.
https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/dail...ical-paul/
This falls under the same criterion of embarrassment by which we can be assured Jesus was baptized and crucified. A fictional superhero story wouldn't go there.
Assured is a bit of a strong word, though scholars like Ehrman/Tabor are confident about quite a number of thinkgs about the historical Jesus or historical Paul, a bit too confident to my liking. But they are the experts here, not me.
But that aside, there are what appear to be inconveniences that are better explained by a historical personal basis, because otherwise would require explanatory extensions that are quite ad-hoc given what we do know and observe. So Jesus having to get baptized by someone who is supposed to be inferior to him is one of them.
But anyhow, back to Paul, taking a look at the link.
