My apologies for making you wait. This has been a busy day and this may be the only thread I get to until later. But, you are playing nice so I will play nice. I appreciate the change.
Quote: It's pretty clear that when Paul wrote
I guess I am not being clear. I see no actual evidence that “paul” existed any more than “jesus” did. He is unknown to the earliest xtian writers and, here I have to disagree with you strenuously, the absence of his name in Justin’s work is compelling. It is the church itself which insists that it was “Paul” who brought the word to the gentiles and battled with the jewish elements about circumcision and dietary laws. Marcion – who in my view is the inventor of “Paul” – had a version of xtianity which was decidedly anti-jewish. Why did the foremost apologist of his time not know the name of the man who supposedly single handedly brought this tale to the gentiles a mere 70-80 years earlier? That is not an argument from silence. It is a shriek from silence. And before you go off half-cocked about Kenneth Kitchen’s “argument from silence” mantra – which is usually misinterpreted even though he did say it – understand that there is no evidence for a Martian Invasion of the Great Plains in the 1880’s either. The fact that there is no evidence for it does not mean that it happened.
The only place we see references to this paul fellow is in books that were written by xtians and only after the mid-second century. “Paul” himself knows nothing of Pilate, Joseph, Mary, Bethlehem, Nazareth, water to wine, Lazarus, walking on water, yada, yada, yada. Again, apologists make up lots of excuses for these lapses but ignore Occam’s Razor which would suggest that they did not happen. Marcion’s intent was to get rid of the jewish elements. His canon, as told to us by Tertullian consisted of a single gospel – Luke (the most Roman of the 3) shorn of its first 2 chapters and 10 epistles of this “paul” guy. It is only after Marcion that “paul” becomes a big hitter in the xtian lineup.
You know, it is commonplace in works of fiction that characters only exist with the pages of those books. I would not expect to find evidence of Darth Vader in Gone With the Wind any more than I would expect to find evidence of Scarlett O’Hara in Star Wars. Fiction doesn’t work that way.
So let’s forget about your bible stories for the moment and look at actual history. There are few historical markers in any of “paul’s” writings. Even modern biblical scholars generally only regard 7 of the 14 letters attributed to him as authentic and since we don’t have the originals and Bart Ehrman has shown what happens to letters which are copied and copied I’m not even sure what “authentic” means in this case. But 1 and 2 Corinthians are almost always included in the authentic batch and it so happens that one of those rare historical markers is included in 2 Cor 11.
“32
In Damascus the governor, under Aretas the king, was guarding the city of the Damascenes with a garrison, desiring to arrest me; 33 but I was let down in a basket through a window in the wall, and escaped from his hands.”
Xtians will tie themselves in knots trying to make this be Aretas IV who ruled Nabatea until c. 40 AD but we know that Aretas was running from the Roman Governor of Syria c 36 and only escaped because of the death of Tiberius. It is discussed in depth earlier in this thread.
However, c 84 BC, Aretas III did take Damascus and held it until Gnaeus Pompey’s legions came rolling through in 64 BC. It was Roman thereafter until the Arabs took it from the Byzantines in the 7th century. Not a single Roman or Jewish historian indicates that the city was ever conveyed to Aretas IV. Josephus recounts that in 66 when the Jewish rebels repulsed the XIIth Legion the good citizens of Damascus retaliated by massacring the Jews therein. Not a word about the region being under Nabatean control.
If you look at the map earlier in the thread you will see that Nabatea is a long way from Damascus which would make governing it somewhat problematical for the Nabateans. It would be akin to the US telling Mexico “we’ll give you Colorado back” but good luck getting there because we are keeping Arizona, N. Mexico and California. Rationality is not a strong suit of xtians at such occasions. They are desperate to fit the story into their timeline so they make up whatever they need to make up in order to do so. But…while we’re on the subject of Corinth...
Let’s talk about Corinth in history. In 146 BC the Roman consul, Lucius Mummius leveled the city of Corinth. It was a big year for leveling cities: Carthage met the same fate at the hands of a much larger Roman army. And, just like Carthage, Corinth remained uninhabited for just over 100 years. In 44 BC, shortly before his murder, Julius Caesar decided to found Roman colonies on both sites probably with the observation that both pieces of real estate were simply too good to waste. I’m sure you already see the problem. While “paul” (or whoever) was making good his escape from Damascus and Aretas III he would have been writing to a city which did not exist. This seems odd.
But it doesn’t get a lot better for Corinth in the middle of the first century. In the aftermath of Caesar’s murder the primary battleground between the various parties in the civil war and the later war against Antony and Cleopatra was Greece. Corinth, as a Roman military colony for Caesar’s veterans does not seem to have flourished.
http://corinth.sas.upenn.edu/vesp.html
“T
he city as planned for in the Caesarian colony appears to have been reduced by about 40 percent. One implication of this contraction is that the population of the original Roman colony never became as large as originally anticipated.”
So the city seems to have been something of a flop which may have induced Nero to try the previously unheard of idea of building a canal across the Isthmus of Corinth. Vespasian, then campaigning in Galilee against Josephus and his rebel army sent a gift of 6,000 slaves to the emperor to work on the canal. And some 10 years later it was Vespasian who re-founded the colony. From there, it appears to have grown during the Pax Romana and when the 2d century Greek geographer Pausanias got to there during the reign of Hadrian it was a going concern. Yet, Pausanias was interested in religious customs and carefully noted the location and purpose of various shrines and temples. But guess what? Even in the mid 2d century he found no evidence whatsoever of jews or xtians.
I’ll end this here for now. But when I speak of evidence – I mean historical evidence. I’m not interested in quotes from elsewhere in the novel.
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