It’s not a debate but a curiosity. I know his historicity is accepted (though there are theories he was Apollonius of Tyana or multiple people, etc.) and I’m curious and don’t have books on the subject available.
What is the earliest official record of him outside of his Epistles? Are he and or his writings/excecution/actions recorded by contemporary Roman historians? I know the name Paul means “little” or “short” but is there any reason to believe it may also have been the “Pol” sometimes used as a nickname for Apollo(nius) (rather like Paul Revere’s father Anglicized “Apollos de Rivoire”)?
Just curious and thanks for any info. (Again, I’m not questioning his historicity, just wondering about the evidence for, unlike Jesus, I haven’t read much of the evidence for Paul.)
What do you mean by “external evidence”? Paul is a central figure in the Acts of the Apostles, written in the 80s (possibly 90s), most likely by the author of the Gospel of Luke. There are also the traditions regarding when and how he died and where he was buried–tales (of whatever provenance) that have received small glimmers of support from various archaeological findings. The earliest of these of which I know is the First Letter of Clement, (as poetic and vague as itr is), written in the early second century. It is not an eye-witness account, but it is relating the tradition of the Christian community of the period about a person whom they believe to have been real, rather than a literary device.
It would be quite surprising if Apollonius had any relationship with Paul. Apollonius would have been several years older than Paul (providing we accept the testimonies of the author of Acts regarding Paul and Philostratus (II?) regarding Apollonius); Paul’s writings regarding Jesus and the new Christian beliefs are quite different than those of Apollonius, with different tones and quite different beliefs. (To reconcile them, one would have to posit Apollonius taking six to twelve years out of his life as a more-or-less conventional pagan to write a series of tracts on a new system of beliefs originating in (if sharply diverging from) Judaism.)
I suspect that the association of Apollonius with Paul have their origins in the coincidence that both spent their youth in Tarsus and both experienced major events as adults in Ephesus, but I have never seen a serious linkage between the two. That evidence would be no more persuasive than linking two men of the 20th century for having connections to both Buffalo, NY and Philadelphia, PA or San Antonio, TX and San Francisco, CA.
I’m not aware of any serious scholars who suggest that Paul was Apollonius. On the other hand, there are a number of scholars who argue that the “Pastoral Epistles” (I-II Timothy and Titus) were written by a later author, and Ephesians and Colossians are similar in ways which lead some scholars to think one was a later re-write. But this sort of question is by no means uncommon with ancient writers.
As tomndebb note, the letters themselves are rather good evidence, corroborated by the Book of Acts and writers such as Clement.
One point I’d want to note is that our sources for the Greco-Roman world are often much more fragmentary than people imagine. Many famous writings from that period have come down to us through one surviving manuscript; in other cases, we have only a title or a few lines quoted somewhere else to assure us that a document ever existed. My favorite example is the destruction of Pompeii. We know Pompeii existed, and was buried by an eruption of Vesuvius; you can go there and see it. As far as I know there is exactly one written reference to the destruction of the city, in a letter by Pliny. And this was a wealthy town, with villas of the power elite! So I wouldn’t much expect corroborating evidence for a wandering preacher.
I believe a similar example is Hannibal crossing the Alps with his elephants. I think there’s only written account of that event. If you assess historical likelihoods solely by the number of surviving accounts, then Jesus’ life is documented four times better than Hannibal and his elephants.
The fact that the Epistles exist proves that someone wrote them, so in that sense, it’s silly to ask whether Paul existed. One may, of course, ask whether all of the writings attributed to Paul were indeed written by the same person. In fact, the letter to the Hebrews was traditionally ascribed to Paul, but current scholarship (as I understand it) is almost unanimous that it was not (who it actually was is a mystery, and given how little information we have from those times, likely to remain so).
One may also ask whether the guy who wrote the bulk of the Epistles wrote anything else which has survived, possibly under a different name. This is the category into which I would put the hypothesis that Paul and Apollonius were the same man. While I don’t know the truth of that one (though I’ll take the other Dopers’ word on Apollonius specifically), even if it were true, it wouldn’t mean that Paul didn’t exist, any more than Samuel Clements didn’t exist because he also used the name Mark Twain.
I would note that Hebrews is a special case and there was, in the West, a period until about circa 400ish where Hebrews wasn’t considered ‘canonical’. And you say *that is true of anything before there is a solid defined canon * right? I was just reacting to the “current scholarship” part and think offering this additional observation is proper …
tomndeb’s cite of Clement is a literal GQ answer (& as usual) a great one- but does anyone have a first non-Christian cite as an answer to this? Just curious as to what it was
If this is accurate, color me astounded! Can anyone point me to literature that examines the tenuous nature of generally accepted history along these lines?