I have heard it said here and elsewhere that the Epistles of Paul show a “disconnect” with many things presented as both “factual” and important in the Gospels. Of course, the consensus of scholarship is that the timing his writings actually preceded the Gospels. At least, we can say this of those Epistles without authorship dispute. And those are the ones which would be germane to skepticism. So it may well be expected, at least to skeptics, that he wouldn’t “know” certain things he “should have” known.
I’m interested in a complete list, if extant, of examples where Paul either apparently disagreed with specific tenets of the 4 Gospels, or apparently would have been surprised to hear the tenets in the first place.
I am aware 1 Corinthians 15 presents a list of witnesses of the Resurrection without a single mention of “certain women” or specific ones. This is in stark contrast to the Gospels which all indicate the priority of the grieving women seeing an empty tomb. To those of us with skeptical bent, this indicates that the various traditions incorporated into the 4 gospels came somewhat late, and Paul either had not heard of them at all, or did not credit them.
ISTR that Paul never once mentions a “Virgin Birth” of Jesus (sometimes the “Immaculate Conception” of Mary is conflated into this term by confusion and ignorance).
Have a look at the works of G. A wells, Professor of German at Birkbeck University. He’s written a number of books on the historicity of Jesus (he doesn’t think Jesis actually existed), and he discusses the textual evidence at great length, including a lengthy discussion of Paul, since his works are the earliest. I don’t think he has a list, but, especially in The Historical Evidence for Jesus, he talks about what Paul and the other New Testament writers do say.
You’re right that Paul doesn’t mention the Virgin Birth – he does say that Jesus was born of a woman, and if he knew of the Virgin Birth, that would be the place to say it. He also doesn’t name the apostles, although he knows of a group called “the twelve”. Furthermore, he buttresses his arguments with citations from the Old Testament, rather than with the sayings of Jesus, suggesting that he was not aware of most of them. A notable exception is the formula for the Eucharist, which he does quote.
Well in the same paragraph (Gal 1:11-1:24) he says that he learned everything he knows about Christianity via direct revelation, but then says that he was famous for persecuting Christians back during his Jerusalem days, indicating that he knew the religion well enough to persecute it.
That doesn’t mean he knew much about it, or rather that he knew anything true about it. If anything it’s easier to persecute a group that you don’t know much about.
Look at all the prejudice against various groups and all the “facts” justifying that persecution.
You may be thinking of Romans 3, where Paul lays out an argument as follows.
Is it good to be a Jew, and to keep Jewish law?
Yes, because the Jews are God’s chosen people, and the people to whom God first reveals Himself.
What if Jews do not keep the Law? Does God cease to be faithful to His covenant with them?
No. God’s faithfulness is absolute, not conditional. This is seen in the fact that, despite the Jewish people’s periodic falling-away from or neglect of the Covenant, they remain the vehicle of God’s revelation [because Jesus is born a Jew].
But if the periodic infidelity of the Jewish people mainly serves to highlight the constant fidelity of God, does that make infidelity good? Would be be unjust of God to be angry at infidelity?
No. One of God’s essential characteristics is right judgment. He cannot judge infidelity - a wrong - to be right. [Paul is implicitly saying that infidelity is intrinsically objectively wrong and, given that, infidelity cannot be justified simply by showing that it leads to good consequences.]
And then to explain the point, Paul provides this parallel (at Romans 3:7-8):
**“You might as well say that if my untruthfulness makes God demonstrate his truthfulness, to his greater glory, then I should not be judged to be a sinner at all.
In this case, the slanderous report some people are spreading would be true, that we teach that one should do evil that good may come of it. In fact such people are justly condemned.**
In other words, Paul says, people do in fact accuse him/his followers/Christians at large of telling lies that good might come, but those people are wrong.
He doesn’t give any detail as to the lies he might be accused of telling, and accused of justifying by pointing to good consequences, but it’s not hard to hazard a guess. There’s evidence elsewhere that Paul could blow hot and cold on the necessity for followers of Jesus to observe Jewish dietary and other laws, depending on who he was talking to.
On the wider question, there’s lots of things that Paul doesn’t say about Jesus. It doesn’t necessarily follow that he doesn’t know them, though.
In fact he tells us virtually nothing about the person, circumstances or life of Jesus. Pretty much everything he says on this subject can be summed up as follows:
Jesus came from Nazareth.
He had a brother called James.
He was crucified.
He rose.
That’s about it, really
That’s obviously consistent with his knowing nothing more, and it is entirely possible that he did know little or nothing more than that. He wasn’t around during the public ministry of Jesus, and he doesn’t appear to have been close - to put it no higher - to the more prominent of the people who were.
But it’s also consistent with the idea that he’s not terribly interested in these topics, and chooses to write on other topics.
Of course, part of the reason for his not being interested in writing about these topics could be that he doesn’t know very much about them or, at any rate, that others know more about them, and can speak with more authority. But I don’t think we can assume that the limit of his knowledge is represented by what he put into his letters.
He did evidently meet and know several of the Apostles, but he wasn’t terribly close to them as far as we know.
This is probably the case. We should remember that his letters were practical and theological advice, not generally instruction per se. He did that in person across the Roman Empire.
I don’t think it’s an untruth, but you might be thinking about the “unknown god” speech given in Athens (Acts 17:23 is where it starts). Paul finds a statute to an unknown god, then delivers a sermon saying, in effect, “My God is your unknown god, and now I’m here to tell you about him.” Wikipedia has a good page about this, describing how Paul’s speech played to the existing beliefs and conventions of the Greeks.
Thank you for an especially good post. I had just recently come across Romans 3:7, together with some interesting observations about what Paul is quoted on in Acts, upon some online word searches. - Jack
I think that G.A. Wells has changed his position with regards to Jesus’s historicity.
I’m not sure that Paul said that, I think that people often have that impression of Eusebius - who was an early church leader. I haven’t done any extensive research so I can’t really comment on whether this is true or not, however, Wiki notes:
I have a dim recollection of Eusebius writing something that suggested lying for the faith was a good thing - but take that with a grain of salt. This could be based on Gibbon’s interpretation of Eusebius based on a chapter heading as opposed to the actual text though (see here for details).
He now admits that someone wrote down the quotations, but he still doesn’t think that a historical Jesus anything like the character generally accepted existed. He believes that the events og Jesus’ minstry and the Passion didn’t happen.
Okay, I’ve just come across something from an unusual source, “The Gospel According to Peanuts” by Robert L. Short. It was in the first chapter, and the book “surfaced” a short time after moving. It’s 1st Corinthians, 9:20-22.
Here is the KJVersion of it:
20 And unto the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain the Jews; to them that are under the law, as under the law, that I might gain them that are under the law;
21 To them that are without law, as without law, (being not without law to God, but under the law to Christ,) that I might gain them that are without law.
22 To the weak became I as weak, that I might gain the weak: I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some.
This seems to be exactly what I’ve been looking for.
(emphasis added)
Now, Cal, I didn’t say you could take my name in vain!
Well, you were looking for an example of Paul “lying”. It seems a bit harsh to characterize Paul’s stance of being “all things to all men” as lying when Paul clearly drew a distinction between being all things to all men (good; 1 Cor 9) and lying (bad; Rom 3, 1 Tim 1, Col 3 and elsewhere). Whatever Paul means by “being all things to all men”, I doubt that he means lying; he describes himself as, despite being free, having become “a slave to everyone”. In other words, he tries to be the apostle that people need him to be.
We’d need to know a bit more about how that played out in practice before we could accuse him of dishonesty. It’s fairly clear from the passage in Romans that I quoted earlier that he was accused of dishonesty, but also that he felt the accusation was unjust. I don’t think we should assume that his accusers were correct. And, if the issue is not whether Paul was dishonest but whether he defended dishonesty as being justified by the greater good, the answer has to be “no”. Paul defended his conduct in Rom 3 by saying that it wasn’t dishonest, not that its dishonestly was justified by the outcome. In 1 Cor 9 he doesn’t seem to me to be defensive at all.
