Christian Texts and History • The Problem of Paul

the Problem with Paul, simply put, is that Paul's teachings in the Paulines are strongly opposed the those of Jesus in the synoptics, and yet his teachings are pushed forward by most Churches. In this thread we want to pull together the writers over the years that have been critical of having Paul in Christianity (and there were many), and to look at the Early Christian writers on this conflict with Paul. Tertullian called Paul the "Apostle Of The Heretics", meaning that the heretics of his time, like Marcion, Valerian and Basilides all relied on the "Pauline" teachings.

Robert M Price, author of The Amazing Colossal Apostle writes:

But let's just say for sake of argument that Marcion first went public with his "New Testament" in 144, and that's the first time that anyone saw Marcion's version of Paul's letters.

There is no account of anyone knowing of a collection of Paul's letters prior to that.

In "The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul" (Kindle Locations 937-942), he writes:

Somewhere between 100 and 150 CE, Paulinism as a theological system arose out of a mystical and speculative circle. Van Manen speaks of the Paulinist movement and Gnosticism arising from the same circles... Tertullian called Paul “the apostle of Marcion and the apostle of the heretics,” and both Irenaeus and Tertullian noted how much 'the heretics' cherished Paul’s writings. The first commentators on the epistles were the Gnostics Valentinus1, Heracleon?, and Basilides [c. 100 - c. 139 e.v.].

We can find no account of anyone knowing of a collection of Paul's letters prior to MarcionOrLater (circa 144 AD), so we consider the Paulines as falsely attributed to Paul, and hence we call them the Faulines.

The problem of Paul is how did his letters rise to such a place of prominence in the churches?

Statistics: Posted by ebion — Tue Dec 26, 2023 11:57 pm

---