I didn’t mean it wasn’t direct revelation, but I see how my prior post implies that. Paul writes, "I want you to know, brothers, that the gospel I preached is not something that man made up. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ… But when God, who set me apart from birth and called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not consult any man, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was, but I went immediately into Arabia and later returned to Damascus. " (Gotta love Paul’s run-on sentences).
I’m not sure it implies instant, full knowledge of Jesus. Even if it does – even if Paul suddenly became imprinted with all of Jesus teachings – it doesn’t follow that what he knew and taught was materially different from what the original Apostles were teaching or what they understood to be Jesus’ teachings.
In other words we don’t have any evidence that Paul “hijacked” Christianity; but at least some evidence that he continued to teach what the earliest disciples did. The biggest difference is that so much of his writing (or letters attributed to him) survived, while we have little or no writing from the other disciples. Which makes sense since few of them were likely to have been educated.
I also think Paul, despite the run-on sentences…wrote with passion and a sense of reality that seem missing in many of the gospels. Of course, his epistles were letters and contained more friendly, personal notes than the gospels…which come off as stilted and (in my opinon) really bad attempt at history or biography.
I hated Paul for years…and spoke out against his teachings. But I have come to regard him as a decent advocate for something which meant a lot to him. I wish he had picked something else to champion…but that is not what happened.
I’d sure as hell hate to go head to head with him in a used car lot I was visiting, I can tell you that!
In Desire of the Everlasting Hills, Thomas Cahill makes much of Paul’s trade: He was a tentmaker. (I do not recall if that is mentioned in the Bible or is merely a tradition.) This was a very convenient occupation for an itinerant evangelist: Every town in the eastern Empire had at least one marketplace – bazaar or agora or forum – every merchant in every bazaar had a tent or awning, every tent or awning needed repair occasionally. Paul could come into any town, head straight for the bazaar, scout up some business right away, earn his keep and have some spare time for preaching (the bazaar was also a good place to scout for converts, as practically everybody in town went there occasionally and it was the place news and gossip were traded). If that is true, then I suppose he was a pretty sharp businessman.
What it does do, though, is really obscure what part of Paul’s teachings were original to him (or which came from “revelation” if you prefer), and what was already current in the primary apostolic movements. it’s possible, for instance, that the disciples had ineed claimed to have had visions of Jesus after the crucifixion, and that they already believed in his imminent reurn as “the son of man,” but I think it was Paul who first interpreted the crucifixion as a salvic sacrifice with Christ as the ultimate pascal surrogate. I think it’s also highly probable that Paul was the first to see the event as universally salvic to all mankind, and that the Christian movement should likewise reach out to gentles.
While the Jesysalem movement may have accepted Gentile converts, they were still accepting thm as converts to Judaism, and still essentially saw the movement as Jewish. Paul said they could be saved as Gentiles.
The irony, of course, is that this resulted in Christianty becoming an almost totally Gentile movement, while the original Jewish-Jesus movement vanished after the Jewish-Roman Wars.
There’s that and the fact that the original Jerusalem movement was scattered or destroyed when the Romans sacked the city in 70 CE. Even if there had been any writings, they were lost at that point (though it’s possible some written sayings collections still in exist in Q and Thomas).
A few more questions about Paul:
-how did he secure the funds to do all that travelling? Travel was very expensive in the ancient world. Did the churches that he visited take up collections for him?
-despite the fact that he (Paul) had never met Jesus, Paul’s writings comprise most of the NT. Obviously, the early church fathers though a lot of him.
-exactly what did paul do in Rome (to seal his doom)? As a roman citizen, Paul had rights that exceeded those accorded Peter. Was paul considered so subversive as to merit death?
The tradition about Paul being executed in Rome is not in the New Testament. The New Testament doesn’t say how Paul died. Acts just ends by saying he spent two years under (what sounds like a pretty casual and friendly) house arrest in Rome.
According to Acts, Paul was in the Temple of Jerusalem, and some people recognized him and raised a mob against him. The Roman authorities then arrested him and imprisoned him. He was imprisoned in Caesarea for two years. He then appealed to Caesar and was sent to Rome for judgment. Acts ends with him imprisoned in Rome. Christian legend after that says that he was beheaded by Nero.
Some of that appears in Acts, though. Acts 1:10 has an angel telling the disciples that “This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.” And in Peter’s sermon in chapter 2 Peter is recorded as saying “God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of the fact… Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins.” So the ideas about Jesus’ return and his being the key to salvation is attributed to the very early church independent of Paul’s influence. (At least, I’ve never seen Paul credited as a source for the author of Luke-Acts, and other evidence would seem to argue against it like the discrepancies in Paul’s conversion story).
Yep, agreed. In fact Paul confronted Peter over this. Paul’s insistance that Gentile converts did not need to be circumsized was probably one of the best PR moves of the first century.
I had forgotten, but that’s true too. Apparently nobody like Peter or Barnabas thought to (or were able to) write epistles like Paul, to circulate among the early Christian communities.
I know it was written later, but how much of it is truly Pauline in tradition? Some of the details of Paul’s journeys line up with the epistles, but some things don’t, like the conversion I mentioned as well as Paul’s claimed sojourn to Arabia.
It’s the fact that they were written after Paul that matters. That means that none of the theology can be positively identified as pre-Pauline. That’s not to say that it can’t be, but that it’s not possible to definitively locate it.
Not only that, but the author of Luke-Acts is obviously part of the Pauline church. The whole two-part work can be seen as an attempt to integrate the story of Paul into that of Jesus and the rest of the church.
Back when I was an atheist, one of my favorite talking points was about the fact that Paul had invented Christianity and stuffed it with doctrines that were completely different from the teachings of Jesus. I didn’t know quite what the the differences were, but everyone assured me that they existed. You can imagine my surprise when, as I began exploring Christianity and reading the Bible for the first time, I found the teachings of Jesus and Paul to be the same, as far as I can tell. I certainly see no justifications for saying that Paul was “heavier on the morality thoushallnots and much lighter on the love and forgiveness”. Some people seem to think that Jesus was completely non-confrontational and never laid down strict moral rules. If so, they must be reading a different version of the gospels than the one I have. Jesus did have firm opinions about what was right and wrong action and he didn’t hesitate to share them. He was clear that loving God and loving other humans was the great commandment, but equally clear that we should practice love “without neglecting these others”. (i.e. without forgetting religious doctrine and ritual.) And Paul said the same thing. In his epistles, he generally spends the first part answering specific questions about right and wrong on minor questions such as eating meat from pagan sacrifices. Then he slowly segues away from a discussion of such details and into a reminder of the major virtues. It’s most clear in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, but clear in most of his other writings.
This is untrue. No book was ever removed from the Bible, unless you want to discuss Martin Luther removing the Catholic Apocrypha 1500 years later. If you’re thinking about the gnostic gospels, they were never in the Bible in the first place. They were rejected from inclusion in the Bible because they were written so many generations later than the canonical gospels. As for “because they were written by women”, forget it. That it would only apply to the Gospel of Mary if it was actually written by Mary, which it wasn’t, and it’s fairly unlikey that it was written by any woman.
Huh? 1 and 2 Peter, 1, 2, and 3 John, James, and Jude are all canonical epistles, written by people who were not Paul. The authorship of all of these is hevaily disputed, but I don’t know of anyone who claims that Paul wrote them.
Skammer was saying that the actual direct disciples of Jesus did not leave any writings (that we know of), not that there weren’t any non-Pauline epistles.