Paul reshaping the church

[athrock]

Of course I'm guilty of selection bias...because the Early Church was. If someone could not prove his apostolic succession, he was not considered a legitimate leader in the Church. And the same went for early writings, also.

This is NOT a problem. Atheists SCREAM that the gospels were written "late" and therefore are untrustworthy. So, you'll forgive me if I hold the gnostic gospels to the same (or higher) standard when it comes to insisting on early documents only.

Define prove. See here's the problem, nothing was ever proven. They accepted writings such as 1 and 2 Peter that were clearly written in the second century, and not by Peter. So by virtue of the fact they got that wrong, it shows they can't be trusted to be right about apostolic authorship either. And I might add that their information about Matthean and Markan authorship was also completely wrong. That's not something that atheists claim, it's accepted by a majority of New Testament scholars today, regardless of their personal beliefs. Yet if you do a Google Search on it it returns but 35,000 results. Wouldn't you know it.. it's just one of those things that Christians would prefer to ignore or remain wilfully ignorant of.

Nope. You WANT to see disunity because it makes you feel better. But the Early Church did not suffer from the kinds of division that you are insisting upon. To the contrary, the Early Church Fathers made sure that they knew the lines of succession from one Bishop to the next and the entire process of establishing the canon was about weeding out those books which were not divinely inspired based, in part, on whether or not they were of Apostolic origin or accepted by those whom they knew and trusted.

Oh, and I disagree with you concerning the authorship of Matthew and Mark. The Pontifical Biblical Commission judged:

Concerning the Author, the Date, and the Historical Truth of the Gospel according to Matthew

June 19, 1911 (AAS 3 [1911] 294ff; EB 401ff; Dz 2148 ff)

I: Having regard to the universal and unwavering agreement of the Church ever since the first centuries, an agreement clearly attested by the express witness of the Fathers, by the titles of the Gospel manuscripts, the most ancient versions of the sacred books and the lists handed on by the holy Fathers, by ecclesiastical writers, by Popes and Councils, and finally by the liturgical use of the Church in the East and in the West, may and should it be affirmed as certain that Matthew, the Apostle of Christ, was in fact the author of the Gospel current under his name?
Answer: In the affirmative.

II: Should the verdict of tradition be considered to give adequate support to the statement that Matthew wrote before the other Evangelists and wrote the first Gospel in the native language then used by the Jews of Palestine for whom the work was intended?
Answer: In the affirmative to both parts.

Concerning the Authors, Dates, and Historical Truth of the Gospels according to Mark and Luke

June 26, 1912 (AAS 4 [1912] 463ff; EB 4O8ff; Dz 2155ff)

I: Does the clear verdict of tradition showing extraordinary unanimity from the beginnings of the Church and confirmed by manifold evidence, namely the explicit attestations of the holy Fathers and ecclesiastical writers, the quotations and allusions occurring in their writings, the use made by ancient heretics, the versions of the books of the New Testament, almost all the manuscripts including the most ancient, and also internal reasons drawn from the text of the sacred books impose the definite affirmation that Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, and Luke, the doctor, the assistant and companion of Paul, were really the authors of the Gospels that are attributed to them respectively?
Answer: In the affirmative.

Evangelical scholars would agree with these decisions.

If that is true, then we must discount every historian who ever wrote a line.

Do we have any autobiographical accounts of the reign of Plato? Alexander the Great? Tiberius Caesar? No? Okay, then we can know nothing about them. Bummer.

Don't be disingenuous. If we have two accounts of an event, and one is first-hand and the other isn't then the first-hand account is always preferred unless there's some other reason to distrust it. And if we have two different accounts of an historical event, and one is supernatural and the other isn't, then we prefer the one that doesn't invoke mysticism.

So, your answer is no. We don't have any contemporaneous biographies of other figures of the ancient world. NOTHING remotely like the wealth of information we have about an insignificant carpenter from Palestine.

Right. Because during all those weeks, months and years that Paul and Luke walked the dusty roads of their missionary journeys together, there simply wasn't TIME for Paul to tell Luke what had happened in any great detail. Maybe not at all. Ever.

And we certainly have no reason whatsoever to believe that Luke ever sat through a sermon in which Paul told his audience how he had met the Lord. No, siree. Luke had no material from Paul to work with. None.

Acts is probably written after Paul has died, and we don't know whether Luke himself wrote it or whether it was an associate of Luke and either is equally likely.

See above. And Luke had to have been written before Paul died. Otherwise, he would have mentioned it just as he mentioned the deaths of Stephen and James.

Right. Paul learned that proto-creed in 1 Co 15 directly from the Apostles in Jerusalem, and he recounted in VERBATIM (apparently even the Greek syntax of that passage is different than his norm style providing additional support for the idea that he was repeating from memory) what he had received at a VERY. EARLY. DATE.

This strengthens my position...not yours.

Very early? Look all the creed demonstrates is they had a belief that Jesus had been risen, not resurrected. That as I pointed out required no immediate evidence following the crucifixion, and could easily have begun due to the disciples finding that the tomb was empty. And there are two likely explanations for this: 1. they went to the wrong tomb, or, 2. the family moved the body in the evening of Nissan 16 (before the disciples came in the morning of the same day). In either case it indicates the family probably didn't want the disciples visiting the resting place of Jesus.

Thomas refused to believe unless he was able to put his finger into the nail wounds. Jesus volunteered to eat some fish in their presence. I'm not sure what kind of word game you;re playing by trying to distinguish between "resurrection" and "risen", but the disciples knew that Jesus had died, he was buried and he rose again (bodily) and appeared to them. This creed was taught to Paul by those witnesses within five years of the event.

So much for the Telephone Game theory.

Moved? By whom?

Either Joseph since he had custody of the body, or the family. Neither of whom actually show up in the gospels to refute this hypothesis.

Oh, good....it was Joseph. Great! So, all we have to do is read the account of how the Pharisees demanded that Joseph take them to where he had disposed of the body and how they paraded it through the streets of Jerusalem in order to put down this new sect.

You have a link to that account online? Nothing?

Right. You have nothing but your wishful thinking.

No, the Jews taught that the DISCIPLES had stolen the body.

That's just what Matthew says, it's hardly reliable. I do believe I made the point earlier that as with any "us and them" things in the ancient world, what one culture/group/region/nation says about another needs to be taken with a grain of salt. They tend to make all kinds of stuff up about "them".

Right. That is what Matthew, an apostle, says. That's what Peter and James and John and Paul said. That's what any of the 500+ eyewitnesses to the resurrection (meaning his body came back to life after being dead for 48+ hours) said.

YOU, however, from the vantage point of 2,000 years later, have bupkis. Squat. Nada. Zilch. But you're willing to believe all sorts of foolishness that people have made up centuries later.

None of the gospels or the Book of Acts mention the destruction of the Temple, or the deaths of Peter and Paul. Yet, the martydoms of James and Stephen are mentioned...and they were lesser players. The conclusion that one might easily draw from this is that these books were written BEFORE AD 64...possibly as early as the mid-50's for the gospel of Mark.

There's more than one explanation for that. The Gospels aren't going to mention the destruction of the Temple anyway, they all end after the death of Jesus (Mark) or the supposed immediate aftermath of his death.

Wrong. And stunningly stupid.

If the Temple had been destroyed before the gospels had been written, it would have been the proof of what Jesus taught.

It's only Acts that you'd expect to mention their deaths and destruction of Jerusalem. It may have been that Luke didn't feel it was necessary to include recent events that everyone seemed to know all about anyway - it'd be superfluous and a waste of papyrus.

Damn! I almost used that "waste of papyrus" argument when responding to your nonsense about why Paul didn't mention Judas Iscariot. Arghh! You used my line.

Well, there you have it, Aractus...Paul didn't bother to mention Judas in any of his letters (which were pastoral in nature, btw...no biographical or historical) because papyrus was too expensive. The argument cuts both ways, doesn't it?

So, let's consider for a moment that this is a legitimate reason for BOTH of our arguments: I say Paul never mentioned Judas because it wasn't the primary purpose of Paul's letters to recount history which "everyone seemed to know all about anyway" (he was solving pastoral problems and teaching doctrine) and YOU say that Luke never mentioned the deaths of the two most important figures in the Church OF ALL TIME simply because he didn't have room.

Which of these two arguments is more likely?  

It may be that Peter and Paul didn't die until the 70's AD, which would increase the likelihood of Luke not mentioning them. The more recent it is the less reason to bother taking about it. Or, they may have been written in the early 60's and it doesn't change anything.

Or they hadn't died, yet, meaning that Acts was written prior to AD 64 and his first work was written even earlier.