I go back and forth on whether I think Paul really existed, but I think there is one major reason to doubt that he did.
The orthodox understanding of Paul and pretty much every aspect of the origins of the religion is clearly entirely wrong. Everything Irenaeus says about Marcion and other heretics is a bunch of mixed up nonsense. And according to Irenaeus there was a large array of churches that attested to his version of the faith.
But no evidence of these churches comes to bear. More troubling, however, is that no one apparently was around to refute Irenaeus and his kind either!
If there had actually been some kind of real organic Pauline ministry that actually left behind Pauline communities from which the Pauline writings were gathered, then there would have been real people to refute the orthodox claims. But the fact that there was no one around to really refute the orthodox claims indicates that there never was any kind of real movement to begin with.
Had there really been a Pauline ministry then it means there would have been a host of existing churches that had interactions with "Peter", Paul, and numerous other apostles. These people would have had accounts of what really happened and what their real beliefs were. They would have denied the claims of orthodoxy. But as far as we know, none of this ever happened.
Its like the orthodox were fighting against an imaginary enemy. Surely Marcion and Valentinus, etc. were real, but when it comes to the earliest figures in this drama, there is no hint of their existence.
It was actually a practice when creating forgeries to completely invent people, because then there were no real witnesses to track down. In other words, if you wanted to forge a slander against someone, then instead of putting that slander in the mouth of a real person you would put the slander in the mouth of a fictitious person. If you put the slander in the mouth of a real person then someone would have opportunity to track that person down and get the truth, or trace down their associates, etc. An imaginary person can never be questioned.
So it seems to me that if there was a real Paul and there were real religious bodies that interacted with him, then people from those bodies would have refuted the claims of the orthodox. Assuming those groups existed anywhere between 40 and 100 CE, surely there would have been at least some inclination to respond to claims being made around 150-180 about the nature of the Jesus being worshiped. For that matter, the same goes for even earlier heresies. Even Marcion's teachings are unlikely to be authentically Pauline, so surely real correspondents with Paul would have had something to say.
But Christianity comes from nowhere, with no one to refute various wild interpretations. So all of this seems to indicate that the writings came first and the writings were then open to interpretation and there was never anyone from any real communities who really worshiped Jesus prior to the publication of writings about him. Thus all belief in Jesus stemmed from writings and there was never a real organic body of Jesus worshipers.
The orthodox understanding of Paul and pretty much every aspect of the origins of the religion is clearly entirely wrong. Everything Irenaeus says about Marcion and other heretics is a bunch of mixed up nonsense. And according to Irenaeus there was a large array of churches that attested to his version of the faith.
But no evidence of these churches comes to bear. More troubling, however, is that no one apparently was around to refute Irenaeus and his kind either!
If there had actually been some kind of real organic Pauline ministry that actually left behind Pauline communities from which the Pauline writings were gathered, then there would have been real people to refute the orthodox claims. But the fact that there was no one around to really refute the orthodox claims indicates that there never was any kind of real movement to begin with.
Had there really been a Pauline ministry then it means there would have been a host of existing churches that had interactions with "Peter", Paul, and numerous other apostles. These people would have had accounts of what really happened and what their real beliefs were. They would have denied the claims of orthodoxy. But as far as we know, none of this ever happened.
Its like the orthodox were fighting against an imaginary enemy. Surely Marcion and Valentinus, etc. were real, but when it comes to the earliest figures in this drama, there is no hint of their existence.
It was actually a practice when creating forgeries to completely invent people, because then there were no real witnesses to track down. In other words, if you wanted to forge a slander against someone, then instead of putting that slander in the mouth of a real person you would put the slander in the mouth of a fictitious person. If you put the slander in the mouth of a real person then someone would have opportunity to track that person down and get the truth, or trace down their associates, etc. An imaginary person can never be questioned.
So it seems to me that if there was a real Paul and there were real religious bodies that interacted with him, then people from those bodies would have refuted the claims of the orthodox. Assuming those groups existed anywhere between 40 and 100 CE, surely there would have been at least some inclination to respond to claims being made around 150-180 about the nature of the Jesus being worshiped. For that matter, the same goes for even earlier heresies. Even Marcion's teachings are unlikely to be authentically Pauline, so surely real correspondents with Paul would have had something to say.
But Christianity comes from nowhere, with no one to refute various wild interpretations. So all of this seems to indicate that the writings came first and the writings were then open to interpretation and there was never anyone from any real communities who really worshiped Jesus prior to the publication of writings about him. Thus all belief in Jesus stemmed from writings and there was never a real organic body of Jesus worshipers.
Statistics: Posted by rgprice — Wed Dec 18, 2024 6:39 am