Would Jesus promote punishing the innocent instead of the guilty?

[Vicki Q]

1) Authentic or Early Paul: 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Romans, Philippians, and Philemon (50s-60s A.D.)

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.)

Thank you for your reply.

The assessment of the letters is fairly standard, although many would argue that 2 Timothy may well be by Paul.

Acts is controversial; it probably shouldn't be used naively as a historical source. However that doesn't imply dogmatic hand-waving away; it is a valid, proper and important source when used with care. It is, after all, Luke- the sequel.

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.

I don't understand this sentence. Are you saying that the miracles are out or in? (2 Corinthians 12:12? Romans 15:19?)

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.

Understanding Paul's story is integral to understanding the development of the Early Church, which is essential sine qua non towards the study of the Historical Jesus.

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.

Category 2 is disputed, as you say, therefore by definition the consensus doesn't call it fan fiction because there is no consensus. Colossians particularly has a strong case to be Pauline. Ephesians and 2 Thessalonians were either written by Paul or by someone close to him and therefore are very important. Category 3 can still be used for illumination rather than support, and Acts is still hugely valuable as above.

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?

Hardly doomed, given the immense volume of top class academic literature doing exactly what I'm doing, and as mentioned earlier in the thread, the academic consensus that his life was as written.

  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.

It's a series of letters plus (Acts) biography. The uses and limitations of letters as historical evidence are highly standardised processes, and using these gives a picture of Paul's life we can know to a high degree of certainty. To repeat, this is not debated in academic circles.

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.

Correspondence between Paul and his young churches is exactly what they are. There is no serious debate about that.



I notice you still haven't provided any evidence for an alternative theory.