For People Who Think There Was No Historical Jesus

[EGross]

Too much of Paul's story sounds bogus. For example, he says he was a zealot, wanting to go after Christians, and his zeal is repeated. The zealots were part of Beit Shammai. He says he was a student of Gamliel (who died in 50CE), but Gamliel was from Beit Hillel and was estranged from beit Shammai, who would not learn from him. Now in 50CE, Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel will support the zealot cause and religious zeal will be the rule of law. THIS would have been the time for Paul to do his thing against the Christians, when there was an anti-gentile sentiment growing, not before. But it had to be outside of Jerusalem, because the great Sanhedrin had already left the Temple decades earlierl, which was the only spot where capital crimes could be judged in that city.

Now, had Paul been preaching in Jerusalem, he would have been a dead man in minutes. The Sicarii were slicing and dicing anyone who would have been preaching avodah zerah (praying to an image of any kind), and Paul said that to follow a Christ, you needed to trat anything Jewish as dung, a disgusting thing to be rid of. yeah, THAT would have gone over well with the Jews!

I like the conspiracy theory that Rabban Gamliel sent Paul, who was really a Hillel guy, to the non-Jews to sell them on a new religion in order to distinguish it from Judaism, so that the messianists in their midst would either be absorbed by one group or the other.

Makes about as much sense as anything else.