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Re: Acts: Paul's story
Posted: Tue Jul 10, 2012 6:04 am
by PaulSacramento
That was a quote by one of the church fathers, Tertullian.
he was making a comment on the "over use" of greek terms and understanding in regards to the bible, which he found incompatiable at times.
Of course the reason so many used greek terms was because for the majority of readers, they were "understandable", even if not as correct as they should be.
Re: Acts: Paul's story
Posted: Tue Jul 10, 2012 9:37 am
by Icthus
Let's look at another chunk of quotes:
1over137 wrote:"Paul derived this narrative of the last supper, not from companions of Jesus, but as one of the private revelations [sic] to which he was liable. It rests, therefore, on no basis of fact, but, like much of Paul's conception of Jesus, is partly, or wholly, an a priori construction of his own mind (Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare, The Origins of Christianity, University Books, 1958 (1910 rev.) (1909), 251).
"Similarly in Paul there is a complete silence about the empty tomb; and it is likely that Paul did not know of this tradition. In any case, he is more interested in the present reality and future significance of the resurrection than in the purely historical aspect of the event " (Origins of Christianity, R. Joseph Hoffmann, ed., "The Story of the First Easter", J. K. Elliott, Prometheus, 1985, 318).
"Paul was the greatest fantasist of all. He created the Christian myth by deifying Jesus" (Hyam Maccoby, The Mythmaker Paul and the Invention of Christianity, Harper & Row, "1987" Pb. (c1986), 204. ).
"The myth [Jesus] adumbrated by Paul was then brought into full imaginative life in the Gospels, which were written under the influence of Paul's ideas and for the use of the Pauline Christian Church" (Ibid., p. 205).
"The only reasonable conclusion is that, since Paul was the great Gnostic spokesman more than fifty years before his writings became orthodox, these were revised and expanded by a process of Catholic forgery" (Ibid., 438).
"The figure in this creed ["Apostles' Creed"] is a mythical or heavenly figure, whose connection with the sage from Nazareth is limited to his suffering and death under Pontius Pilate. Nothing between his birth and death appears to be essential to his mission or to the faith of the church. Accordingly, the gospels may be understood as corrections of this creedal imbalance, which was undoubtedly derived from the view espoused by the apostle Paul, who did not know the historical Jesus. For Paul, the Christ was to be understood as a dying/rising lord, symbolized in baptism (buried with him, raised with him), of the type he knew from the Hellenistic mystery religions. In Paul's theological scheme, Jesus the man played no essential role" (The Five Gospels The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus, Robert Funk, Roy Hoover, The Jesus Seminar, Macmillan, 1993, 7).
"As we have seen, the purposes of the book of Acts is to minimize the conflict between Paul and the leaders of the Jerusalem Church, James and Peter. Peter and Paul, in later Christian tradition, became twin saints, brothers in faith, and the idea that they were historically bitter opponents standing for irreconcilable religious standpoints would have been repudiated with horror. The work of the author of Acts was well done; he rescued Christianity from the imputation of being the individual creation of Paul, and instead gave it a respectable pedigree, as a doctrine with the authority of the so-called Jerusalem Church, conceived as continuous in spirit with the Pauline Gentile Church of Rome. Yet, for all his efforts, the truth of the matter is not hard to recover, if we examine the New Testament evidence with an eye to tell-tale inconsistencies and confusions, rather than with the determination to gloss over and harmonize all difficulties in the interests of an orthodox interpretation." (H. Maccoby, The Mythmaker, p. 139, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1986)
These quotes generally focus on the idea of Paul as the founder of what we now call Christianity. The idea behind these claims is rather simple--Paul was a latecomer to Christianity, a Gnostic or Gentile or abundantly Hellenistic Jew. He knew next to nothing about Jesus but developed a religion around him anyway. He was an enemy of Peter and the Jerusalem Church but was able to spread his ideas among Gentiles. Of course, this view has a lot of problems. It requires that the theorist separates Paul from his Jewish context, that one greatly embellish the differences between him and Peter, that one completely ignore his claims to have met with and received the approval of the Jerusalem Church, that even if he never met Jesus he, as a practicing Jew in Jerusalem would doubtlessly have heard of him (he wouldn't be out of town for the Passover and was obviously present when he was persecuting the early Church). Unfortunately, I'm out of time yet again.
Re: Acts: Paul's story
Posted: Tue Jul 10, 2012 9:44 am
by PaulSacramento
Thing is that Luke and Peter both speak of Paul in high regard, although Peter does mention that in his writings there are things that can be confusing and be twisted by others.
2Peter 3: 14-16
14 Therefore, beloved, since you look for these things, be diligent to be found by Him in peace, spotless and blameless, 15 and regard the patience of our Lord as salvation; just as also our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given him, wrote to you, 16 as also in all his letters, speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to understand, which the untaught and unstable distort, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures, to their own destruction.
Re: Acts: Paul's story
Posted: Tue Jul 10, 2012 10:42 am
by Icthus
PaulSacramento wrote:Thing is that Luke and Peter both speak of Paul in high regard, although Peter does mention that in his writings there are things that can be confusing and be twisted by others.
2Peter 3: 14-16
14 Therefore, beloved, since you look for these things, be diligent to be found by Him in peace, spotless and blameless, 15 and regard the patience of our Lord as salvation; just as also our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given him, wrote to you, 16 as also in all his letters, speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to understand, which the untaught and unstable distort, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures, to their own destruction.
This is precisely one of the things I was meaning to get to, Paul. There is abundant evidence that the apostle Paul was, though he had some of his own ideas to be sure, firmly in agreement with the leadership of the Jerusalem Church like Peter and James on the central tenets of the faith. However, because his letters are such an important part of the New Testament and are among the earliest writings of Christianity existing today, any theory of Christian origins that tries to avoid orthodoxy will inevitably have to tackle the problem of Paul. For centuries, theories have been thrown around about how Paul was a charlatan who highjacked a non-supernatural movement to make Christianity, or that he was a Gnostic who didn't care about the historical Jesus or was the follower of a mystery religion that preached an entirely spiritual resurrection. Such theories are poorly supported by the data we have, but they persist, especially among more radical scholars (like Price who we discussed in another topic) or lay skeptics (note the number of quotes on that list that don't come from scholars--Jefferson, Shaw, Paine, etc).
On a related note, I read not too long ago an interesting piece by N. T. Wright on Paul on women that made some very interesting points. Hopefully I'll be able to find it eventually and report back. I think Paul tends to get a bad rap on women and slavery that's often exaggerated (after all, he seemed accepting of female leaders like Priscilla and never said slavery was good).
Re: Acts: Paul's story
Posted: Tue Jul 10, 2012 11:07 am
by PaulSacramento
The issue with Paul is that his letters were aimed at individual groups under specific circumstances and we try to make them "general epistles", in short try to make them what they are not.
Of course they have general theology, but when Paul speaks in particular ( like the case of the sexual immorality of one of the members of the Church in Corinth) that is what he is doing, speaking about that particular case and while we can get a general view about how Paul felt about those issues, how it was resolved was base don that particular circumstance.
I agree that Paul has been given a bad rap in regards to women and slavery, typically because people read what they want to read, not what is there ) in regards to slavery) and take it out of its cultural context and, in regards to women, focus on a "controversial" passage in 2Timothy and ignore the undisputed passages of Romans, where Paul praises the women who are active and vocal members of the Church.