Paul’s own account of both his conversion and his conflict with Peter can be found in Galatians 1:11-2:14.
The Acts of the Apostles, supposedly written by (the same person who wrote the Gospel of) Luke deals pretty heavily with Paul. It notes that “the disciples” weren’t totally comfortable with Paul, but doesn’t specifically mention Peter. Oddly, a couple of chapters later, the writer indicates that Peter was the one disciple who was totally on board with preaching to and converting Gentiles, which was Paul’s big thing.
I hate to nitpick, but the consensus seems to be that Paul used his Jewish name, “Saul” in Jewish contexts and when he began to branch out to Gentile audiences he began using “Paul”, his Roman name. Note that the name change doesn’t begin until Acts 13, when Paul and Barnabas were visiting Cyprus - 4 chapters after the conversion account.
Sorry, should be 100 years A.D. (the 1 and 4 key are too close on my keyboard)
What I was trying to say, some stories in the bible were told from one person to another for generations before they were written down on (some kind of) paper and may have changed from the authentic event.
The books of the Bible weren’t gathered until the time of Constantine who called on the Bishops to unite the teachings(during the 300s AD), The Bishops of the Roman and Orthodox church decided which writings were inspired and which were not. There was many writings that were dismissed. It was then that Christianity started to take hold in a larger sense. The creed was set up to what Christians were to believe as authentic.
I believe it was during that time that Rome was considered the head of the Church, and used Peter as a start.
Fair enough, I’m certainly no one to argue.
What kind of keyboard do you use?
Considering that Jesus’ crucifixion was estimated to have happened around 30 A.D. and then Paul’s missions occured years after that, the concept that the documents in the New Testament being orally handed down generations later then written is completely false. I think you are confusing the christian New Testament with the Jewish Torah.
Wouldn’t the 1 and 4 be next to each other on a “10 Key”? (above and below)
789
456
123
You’re right. Wasn’t thinking about the 10-key pad.
Still the assertion that the Pauline and Peter epistles were orally passed down over multiple generations is not historically accurate.
That’s not really true either. By the end of the Second Century, the generally accepted New Testament Canon was pretty much what we would recognize it to be now, with a few exceptions (the book of James, 2nd and 3rd John, 2nd Peter, book of Jude were sometimes rejected, Shepherd of Hermas was sometimes accepted). But you have people making lists of canonical writings as early as Marcion and Justin Martyr.
Not to be rude, but have you thought about starting with…yaknow…the Bible?
I have! But when I read the Bible, I find myself wondering about too much…historic context, especially. If there were a version of the Bible that explained who wrote it, their background (as far as it’s known), and the historical context, especially the social context, that it should be understood in…well, I’d love to read it.
I haven’t actually read the Bible right through. I got through a bit of it. I found it dry, I didn’t feel I really knew anything from what I’d read - I knew the words, sure (or the translated words from that particular version), but I didn’t feel I knew what they really meant to the people who’d first heard them. What the original assumptions and biases were. I’m quite interested in the Bible, but only if I can also learn something about the society that produced it.
Even if this were mostly pieced together from the rest of the Bible, a concise explanation would really help my understanding of everything.
Fair enough. Unless you’re already familiar with the Bible, it’s not very helpful for someone to try to answer your curiosity about, say, Paul by handing you a Bible and saying, “Here: read this.” For one thing, if you started in at the beginning, you’d be exhausted long before you came to any mention of Paul.
There are literally hundreds (perhaps thousands) of editions of the Bible that have been published, many of which include things like introductions to individual books and/or the Bible as a whole, explaining who wrote them and in what context—not to mention supplementary volumes such as Bible guidebooks and commentaries. I hesitate to recommend one in particular, but I believe that some edition of the Oxford Study Bible is often used in college courses on the Bible. There are probably plenty of good and not-so-good online sources, but I wouldn’t know which one to specifically recommend. But here are some older threads that have a few more recommendations:
What’s the best bible for study?
Study Bibles, Bible Guides, and Dictionaries
Are there any websites that interpret the Bible for you?
This exactly. I started right from the start, I never got near the New Testament. Part of me felt like if I skipped ahead I’d be cheating, but more than that, it wasn’t telling me what I really wanted to know. I could sit down and read it all from the start…but I have a lot of books to read, and I’d rather find something that tells me more directly what I want to know than spend that time reading it directly, and come away feeling I don’t really understand what it was on about.
Thanks for the websites, I’ll have a look through them. Considering you hesitate to recommend any in particular, I wonder if any other Dopers could give me recommendations? To be honest, it’s social context and what the writers / apostles / people appearing in the Bible would have believed themselves, and how they’d have seen things, that really interests me. I imagine they’d have understood the text differently to how I do, but I can’t tell quite how.
Thanks again, everyone
JohnnyMac, here’s a couple of titles you might be interested in.
One is Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard Elliotrt Friedman, which does a lot to put the Old and New Testaments in a historical context.
The other, more of a textbook, is the Fortress Introduction to the Gospels by Mark Allen Powell, which goes through the evolution of the oral stories about Jesus to the development of four similar but distinct tellings.
Paul wrote of his epiphany in his Letter to the Galatians:
According to the New Oxford Annotated Bible: “Cf. Acts 9.26-30 which gives a different account of these events.”
JohnnyMac, just a few baby-steps intro to Bible study:
- don’t bother with Numbers, it’s a Census. Would you read the latest US Census front-to-end? I sure wouldn’t.
- if you like poetry, the Song of Songs is just that; each of its poems is a Psalm. Many Christian ceremonies include a reading or singing of a poem/song from this book.
- other books are dedicated to compiling sayings, or to instructions which are specific to the Jewish Priesthood; almost as dry as Numbers.
- three of the four Gospels (Mathew, Mark and Luke) are “parallel”; that is, they have a lot of stories in common and study of their similarities and differences is its own branch of Bible Studies. John’s is very distinct, both in the stories he chose and in how he tells them. Also, Luke was a doctor so he’s the one who’s more focused on healing miracles.
- the Letters are just that, letters written by a priest to one of the communities he had worked with.
- the Apocalypsis or Revelations, the last book, is both one of those books that may be best read if slightly, ehm, illuminated yourself and the source of a lot of imagery which many people use frequently without having the slightest idea where it came from (no, it wasn’t Iron Maiden who came up with “the number of the beast”… sigh).
Indeed there were some writings, but there was divisions as to how Christianity was to be.
The whole Bible-as-literature aesthetic experience, is, for me, encapsulated in God’s answer to Job’s lament.
Then there’s the magnificence of the Prophets, the erotic love of the Song of Songs, the profundities of Ecclesiates, and the Shakespearean dimensions of the Psalms, Moses’ speech at the end of the Five Books, and the longer novelette of the battle of David and Saul.
Your mileage may vary, of course. Reading the Bible “from the beginning on” doesn’t really make sense. Pick and choose within any narrative, myth, or poetry.
I realize this is a hijack from OP, but his/her subsequent replies gave me an opening to add my 2cents.