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5th December 2017, 03:52 AM | #1 |
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Did Paul exist?
I've been reading a bit on this issue of late.
My overall view of this is that almost nothing is knowable about early Christianity and whether or not Paul existed can't be known. I think most secular authors agree with this but some argue that he probably did. Earl Doherty and Richard Carrier argue that it is very likely that he did. Ken Humprhreys of JesusNeverExisted.com says even just considering the six generally considered genuine epistles of Paul that the story is too screwy and Paul probably didn't exist. Both Doherty and Carrier seem to have similar ideas about Paul. He was promoting a religion based on a mystical Jesus that didn't exist as a flesh and blood human. Eventually the religion that Paul was pushing morphed into the Christianity we know today with a flesh and blood Jesus as its core. So Paul is an integral part of their story. Ken Humphrey's on the six authentic epistles http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/epistles2.htm Most of his other stuff on Paul relates to how unreliable Acts is. I think most if not all secular Christianity history writes agree with that. Richard Carrier argument that Paul existed https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/7643 Earl Doherty Among Doherty's arguments is that if Paul's writing were a second century forgery they would be focused more on what Christianity had changed to by then. I thought it was a good argument but I don't have a link right now for it. |
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5th December 2017, 05:39 AM | #2 |
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If he never existed how could he have died in 1966?
Personally I always figured it was Ringo who never existed. |
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5th December 2017, 06:35 AM | #3 |
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What does the question even mean?
There are six, or seven - depending whom you ask - authentic Pauline letters. They were clearly written by someone. Scholars agree that they were written by the same person, and as Carrier argues in that link, they show enough unity of style that they were not written by a committee. Does it really matter if the person who wrote them was actually called Ringo and not Paul? Because that's really splitting hairs IMHO. Or does the question mean: was the author of those letters indeed a Jewish tentmaker from Tarsus who had Roman citizenship? (or insert your own favourite biographical details of Paul's life). |
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5th December 2017, 06:59 AM | #4 | ||
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Ringo Starr used to live around the corner from me in Cranleigh. (well a couple of corners in a very fancy bit).
He opened the local bonfire a few times, and the xmas lights, and helped raise money at the for charity at the local cricket club. He was a good local citizen. So he does actually exist. Just putting your mind at ease. Signing autographs at the cricket club. Opening the bonfire.
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5th December 2017, 08:17 AM | #5 |
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I agree with this. Bart Ehrman wrote some great books about the formation of the Christian religion. He for example discusses the difference between the books that the congregations generally accept as written by Paul and books such as Ephesians which he refers to as fraudulent as the writer poses as Paul. I recommend his books Misquoting Jesus and Lost Christianities. You can also see him discussing this on YouTube.
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5th December 2017, 09:47 AM | #6 |
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Those title are both excellent in that they give the "average person*" an insight into some of the problematic points one encounters with NT texts, particularly the Pauline texts. If you wish to dig a bit deeper into the details of the matter and the various methods scholars use in their investigations, I would recommend The New Testament - A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, 2nd ed., Ehrman, Oxford University Press, 2000, ISBN 0-19-512639-4. This was written as an introductory college level text but is still quite accessible to the "average person."
*I use quotation marks here because we've seen repeatedly the average person is not trained in nor generally capable of exercising critical thought where religion and religion-related matters are concerned. |
5th December 2017, 10:43 AM | #7 |
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I think it is funny stupid when fundamentalists in particular try and portray the Bible as inerrant. I had stopped being a Christian when I made myself read the OT, but the final nail in the coffin of my belief was when I read about how and when the Gospels were written.
I'd bet you that 90 percent minimum of Christians believe that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were eyewitness accounts written by people with those names. I remember pointing out to a pastor that I thought it was absurd, even stupid to believe that eyewitness accounts simply are not reliable when they are made after a certain period of time. Also that anyone who had ever played the game telephone knows that a story morphs greatly when it is passed from person to person. And that politics were heavily involved in deciding what was canon and what wasn't. What blew me away was how easily he dismissed these facts as irrelevant because God wanted this result. Psychiatrists refer to it as a self reinforcing delusion. They will rationalize the irrational with a wave of their hand. |
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5th December 2017, 11:01 AM | #8 |
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5th December 2017, 11:11 AM | #9 |
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I meant it to me something like: Was there a guy that existed sometime around 50 CE that did something like the person we know of as Paul today seems to have done based on the six or seven generally believed to be "authentic" Pauline epistles?
If somebody in the second century wrote Paul's epistles even if he was named Paul by my definition, Paul as he is known today would not have existed.
Quote:
From my perspective, we don't know the most important stuff about Paul with regard to the history of early Christianity. We don't know what sect he may have belonged to. We don't know what sect the people he was writing to belonged to. Was he writing to both Jewish and Gentile sects? He seems to claim that. Were they Hellenistic Jewish sects. We don't know much about the possible competitors to Paul. We don't know what Paul intended his message to be about Jesus. Carrier and Doherty both believe Paul was pitching a mystical Jesus and that Paul's message was adopted to fit with a Christianity that developed after him. The depth of knowledge by these guys is impressive but their conclusion with regard to this isn't rock solid IMO. We don't know how Paul came to have the authority that he claims he had in his letters. |
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5th December 2017, 11:26 AM | #10 |
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5th December 2017, 11:31 AM | #11 |
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5th December 2017, 11:37 AM | #12 |
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I don't think you can get past the fact that absolutely NONE of the new testament writers ever had an encounter with the person Jesus. At best, they were told a story by people that knew Jesus.
Which begs the question, if you wouldn't believe someone today who told you personally that they were God, why would you believe anonymous writings in a 2000 year old book by unknown authors of stories they were told? |
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5th December 2017, 12:09 PM | #13 |
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It's quite likely there was a Saul of Tarsus, persecutor of Jews, who later converted and even did meet with some of the Apostles. Odd that his vehemence against following Jewish religious customs stands starkly opposite the assertions in later gospel writing that "not one jot or tittle" of the law was to be changed. And there's no doubt whatever that the Pauline writings did pre-date the gospels. (This bears a quixotic similarity to Trump's saying he did not say what he's on record as having said.)
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5th December 2017, 12:12 PM | #14 |
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This reads like you think greatly delayed eye-witness accounts are reliable, but in the context of the rest of your post, I'm sure you didn't intend your comment to come out that way.
Well, not only are delayed eye-witness accounts often wildly inaccurate, even contemporaneous eye-witness accounts are often inaccurate and vary from witness to witness. A question for the scholars out there... Are there any known independent, contemporaneous secular writings (e.g. by Tacitus, say) or records that mention Paul or reference his existence? By this I mean something that might independently verify the existence of this man. If not, then find I must agree with the OP, the we cannot know whether or not the Paul in question was a real person. |
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5th December 2017, 12:29 PM | #15 |
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I'm not a scholar, but:
Clement I may be the earliest. Clement I seems like it might actually have been written by Clement but datin of Clement or Clement I is not all that precise. (80-140) but I think I saw carrier argue for earlier and before 95-96 is traditional. There are no secular writers that refer to Paul, I believe. But Carrier makes the point that unlike Jesus, it wouldn't be expected that the various writers of the time would have mentioned Paul because Paul could easily be not well enough known to have been noticed by a one of the many writers of the day. |
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5th December 2017, 12:34 PM | #16 |
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In "Did Jesus Exist?" Ehrman makes a good case for a historical Jesus. It has been a while, so I don't remember how much Paul is covered in the book.
Geez! I did a search for Kenneth Moretoes and came up with a site that provides a dictionary of text strings that correspond to MySQL password hashes. There are hundreds of thousands of them at least. |
5th December 2017, 12:46 PM | #17 |
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It's hard to accept Ehrman's work when you don't buy his premise that there is evidence for an historical Jesus.
When asked in a recent interview (The Infidel Guy Show) about the evidence for the historical Jesus, Bart Ehrman threw out the tired line “No Serious/No Reputable Scholar doubts that a historical Jesus existed.” I've looked at the evidence and don't see much supporting an historical Jesus. But the Jesus story started somewhere. Whether Paul is another mythical layer or not doesn't have much relevance in my life. But I find the discussion interesting as long as people don't simply say 'of course' these people were real. |
5th December 2017, 12:51 PM | #18 |
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5th December 2017, 01:04 PM | #19 |
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I saw Ehrman debate Richard Carrier on that question and I found Ehrman more convincing. But even if an itinerant rabbi named Jesus was crucified, it still doesn't confirm that he was a deity that performed supernatural deeds.
I don't doubt for a second that Paul added to the story. It wouldn't shock me one bit that Paul was a con man much like Joseph Smith and L. Ron Hubbard. I've thought one of 2 things. Paul embellished a story about someone with the name Jesus or that he made everything up himself. I lean more to the former than the latter. |
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5th December 2017, 02:30 PM | #20 |
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It's possible that Paul is mentioned in Josephus as "Saulus" a relative of Herod who, with his cousin Costobarus, was commissioned by a High Priest to suppress the people:
Quote:
I started a thread on the topic of Paul as a member of Herod's royal family, based on the ideas of Robert Eisenman. In that thread it is suggested that Paul was actively working against the early Jewish "Jesus Movement" which was mostly a political movement against Roman rule in Judea. Religion and Politics being indistinguishable for the people who eventually rebelled against Rome, Paul's gentile-friendly teachings can be seen as an attempt to subvert the more fundamentalist "not one jot or tittle" style of Jesus and James. It's a long thread, but if you're interested... http://www.internationalskeptics.com...d.php?t=267096 |
5th December 2017, 02:41 PM | #21 |
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By far and away, the bulk of the discussions in his books mentioned above center on the texts themselves, what is known of the times themselves, and what is known and can be revealed as accidental and/or deliberate manipulations of the NT texts. These texts definitely exist, in various stages of preservation and emendation. The variations among them and the deviations of various editions through the ages definitely exist. Since these texts and their various versions are central to many arguments (and even persecutions) through the ages, the matter of the historicity of certain figures is almost secondary. A vast number through the ages have gone with the assumption these texts are based to some degree on actual events, no matter that those accounts could have been and definitely were altered through time; it's possible we'll never ascertain the degree of "real events" they contain but that's become subsumed by 2000 years of culture based in large measure (rightly or wrongly) on them.
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5th December 2017, 02:46 PM | #22 |
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5th December 2017, 02:54 PM | #23 |
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Regardless that the texts exist, it's my understanding the earliest ones were written at ~75-100 years AD.
Which brings us to Paul. It makes sense to me he is the likely source of the Jesus cult, akin to a Joseph Smith for the Mormons. And in Paul's case, we have contemporary writing and other related evidence of the religion existing. |
5th December 2017, 02:58 PM | #24 |
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I watched a clip of Ehrman this morning totally thrashing the idea of the inerrancy of the Bible.
https://youtu.be/p-IG05dQ88Y |
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5th December 2017, 03:16 PM | #25 |
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Again, it has been a few years since reading "Did Jesus Exist?", but I remember Ehrman claiming that the story of the census, Joseph and Mary fleeing, and then having their baby in Bethlehem did not agree with known facts from that period. He makes the point that since people who knew Jesus also knew that he was from Nazareth, which is not where the messiah was supposed to be born, they had to invent a convoluted story to get him born in Bethlehem. If they were making him up from whole cloth, why not just have him born in the correct place to begin with?
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5th December 2017, 03:16 PM | #26 |
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I remember going down this path when discussing the possibilities of a historical Jesus. You'd like to create a definition that would lead to a binary choice, Jesus existed or he didn't, but you know so little that it's hard to make a definition that includes all the possibilities that you might include as an historical Jesus when historical Jesus speculation is so poorly constrained by reliable facts.
With Paul, you have issues like exactly what is the cut off date for Paul, as well as a raft of other issues, like maybe Paul wrote the epistles but mostly he lied, or Paul was a front guy but somebody else wrote the epistles to an endless raft of other speculation about the possible nature of Paul and early Christianity. The general idea here is that the documents of early Christianity were intentionally destroyed to hide facts that were uncomfortable to the people that created Christianity as we know it. Is that true? Of course, nobody knows. What is a little curious to me is that none of the stuff found at Nag Hammadi seems to have predated the Gospels that made it into the bible. A Jesus story writing fad really took off starting around the time Mark was written and a whole raft of Jesus literature was created. The stories were not consistent,something that is true as well of the Gospels that were selected. But except for Paul's epistles nothing has ever been found that predates the writing of Mark which is generally dated to about 70 AD but opinions on that vary quite a bit. As an aside, IMO the Gospels and Acts are historical fiction and they are not probative with regard to the nature of a hypothetical Jesus or Paul. |
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5th December 2017, 03:24 PM | #27 |
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Ehrman is putting forth what I consider to be standard secular ideas about this. All the Gospels copy Mark with regard to the basic Jesus story. Matthew and Luke take the Mark story and add stuff that is almost certainly fictional. It is plausible, I guess, that Luke and Matthew were writing down stories that had been transferred to them orally that had some basis in fact. I doubt it though. They contradict each other, they have obvious agendas and they contain things known to be false. I think they or somebody fairly contemporaneous with them just made this stuff up. I know less about John except it is generally believed to be written after the other three Gospels and that is even less plausible than the first three.
ETA: I think Mark is historical fiction as well. For me, a huge red flag, is that Mark (like the other Gospels) reads like fiction. Conversations and events are recorded where there is no indication of how the author could have known what he is reporting and it seems unlikely that he would have known. There are many other reasons put forth to believe that Mark is fictional as well. |
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5th December 2017, 03:43 PM | #28 |
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5th December 2017, 03:52 PM | #29 |
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Oh, I agree. I just wanted to point out the inherent contradiction when someone claims at the same time they know the Bible and claims that the Gospels were eyewitness accounts, because Luke clearly says it isn't.
ETA: oh, and Acts - commonly held to have been written by Luke as well - has a similar intro. |
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5th December 2017, 03:55 PM | #30 |
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5th December 2017, 03:56 PM | #31 |
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5th December 2017, 04:07 PM | #32 |
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Unlike Jesus, with Paul we at least have letters attributed to him. (Oh, wait: one of the reasons we here that no one wrote about Jesus at the time was that they were illiterate. How did they exchange letters then?) The cult that James was running existed, that much is clear. Did James pretend he had a brother to make an attempt at plausible deniability? Very possible, IMO. Ultimately: Paul is more important to modern Christianity than Jesus. Without him, the Cult would’ve died out long ago.
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5th December 2017, 04:12 PM | #33 |
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I'm sorry. I hope it didn't sound as if I was trying to correct you.
Most Christians that I know have barely read more than a few passages in the Bible. They go to church each Sunday and listen to sermons about God's love and how important it is to be saved. They will be preached the idea that the Bible is the inerrant testimony of God and the life history of Jesus. They will be warned against doubt and unbelievers and those that will lead them away from the flock. What I find interesting is I've met Pastors that would cede the point about the lack of eyewitnesses and still argue the inerrancy of scripture. |
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5th December 2017, 04:15 PM | #34 |
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5th December 2017, 04:26 PM | #35 |
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Surely you mean persecutor of (proto) Christians? That's his backstory in Acts. Moreover, he himself was a Jew according to the backstory, and he was privately educated by a prominent Pharisee (Galamiel?).
IIRC, this is only mentioned in Matthew, and only in one sentence. Moreover, Paul strikes a deal with Peter and James and the Jerusalem gang that he'll proselytize among the goyim and he won't impose the Judaic laws upon them. Circumcision was highly unpopular among Greeks and Romans, and the average Roman, like Obelix, also liked his Gallic pork. His conversion story sounds very much like what modern conman still use: look, I once was zealously anti-christian but then I saw the light... There's also his continuous collecting money "for the poor in Jerusalem". Why would the Christians in Jerusalem be poorer than those in Milete, Ephese, Saloniki, Athens or Corinth? At one time, he pressures the local congregation in giving him money because the congregation in the next town over gave generously. Of course, the next town over was 100 miles away, so nobody could check. Also, nobody's ever seen a CPA's audit report. Meanwhile, he travels around the whole (Eastern) Mediterranean; that cannot have been cheap. Who's to say nothing went to his own expense account? And there's also his odd insistence that he, who only saw Jesus in a vision, knows Him better than Peter, James and the other apostles who spent several years day-in day-out with Him. I wouldn't be surprised at all. |
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5th December 2017, 04:29 PM | #36 |
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5th December 2017, 04:33 PM | #37 |
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Weren’t those religious leaders supposed to be the brother and best friend of the guy in question?
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5th December 2017, 04:38 PM | #38 |
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As soon as anyone proceeds from the assumption that the Bible is inerrant, they lose all credibility with me, because such an attitude shows me that the person is closed-minded, and prepared to automatically hand-wave away any contrary evidence. It would be like a scientist claiming that his theory is 100% correct, regardless of any results that might come along later and which don't fit. We should not accept either of these positions.
As the Rev Dr. Francis H. Wade, former Rector, St Alban's Episcopal Church once said "The Bible is like a person, and if you torture it long enough, you can get it to say almost anything you'd like it to say." |
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5th December 2017, 04:43 PM | #39 |
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Not at all, no problem.
Over here, that kind of Christians don't attend mass/service save for their baptism, marriage and funeral. Obviously, the writers of the gospels were prompted by the Holy Ghost when they wrote them down. God works in mysterious ways, etc. etc. If we take the gospels at face value, it's likely Jesus knew a bit of Greek. His father was a general contractor (not a carpenter), and thus likely knew enough Greek to do business with hellenized Greeks.. Also, Jesus could read the Torah so he also knew Hebrew - by then a dead language outside of liturgy. Most of his apostles, like Peter the fisher, of course knew only Aramaic. |
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5th December 2017, 04:52 PM | #40 |
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It has been a while since I last read the New Testament. Many of the letters were to churches, but some may have been to friends and relatives. I don't remember. I suppose even an illiterate relative could find someone to read the letter to them. In an illiterate society, I can image that being a service you could pay for.
Edit: According to Wikipedia, only four of the thirteen epistles are addressed directly to individuals, none of whom were family. And three of those four are widely considered by historians to be falsely attributed to Paul. Edit again: Wait, you meant Jesus when you said "the guy in question". I thought you meant Paul. Paul wrote to the religious leaders of the church formed on the teachings of Jesus. I don't know if Paul communicated with anyone who actually knew Jesus. |
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