Interesting. I’ve just gone down a rabbit hole and seen Thomas Jefferson call Paul the first corrupter of Jesus’ teachings and I’m seeing everything in a brand new way. It makes a lot of sense.
TIL Jefferson published his own "version" of the New Testament. [1]
> Jefferson mashed up/cut and pasted the New Testament to remove any references to the supernatural, or miracles, as well as the divinity of Christ. His title for the book was "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth," which tells us a lot about his motivations.
It is very strange the amount of theology that comes solely from Paul's idiosyncratic writings, given that he neither met the prophet in question (Jesus), nor was taught by any of his students (apostles), nor even got along particularly well with any of his students.
I'm not really a believer or practicer anymore, but as someone who spent substantial time reading scripture when I was, I've thought a lot about what happens to Christianity if you discard the writings of Paul. If the namesake of Christianity satisfies the claims of the believers, that should be sufficient. Unfortunately, I believe that without Paul's writings, as well as the body of knowledge contained in extra-scriptural writings (commentary through history, catechisms, doctrine passed down by your local church, etc) Christianity pretty much falls apart.
Christianity as an imperial-aligned religion doesn't happen sure, but I'm not sure it falls apart. Jesuism or "The Way," looks a lot more like the Anabaptist traditions, Quakers, Liberation Theology, Christian Anarchism, and secular "Jesus as moral exemplar" movements.
As to the degree that these are falling apart is debatable. They certainly don't have the strong central hierarchy and universalism that Catholic and Protestant sects have, but they seem to endure.
Paul's letters are the earliest evidence of Christianity we have. The gospels weren't written until much later. It wouldn't surprise me if Paul's theology influenced what was written in the gospels.
> I've thought a lot about what happens to Christianity if you discard the writings of Paul.
Without Paul, Christianity reverts to being a variety of Judaism whose leader from the hinterlands got it right about what really mattered in life, as had his predecessors [0]. But he fatally misjudged the big city's religious oligarchs — vassals to their ruthless Roman occupiers — when he relentlessly attacked them and their cozy little setup; at their behest, he was executed by the Roman overlords.
Some [1] of the leader's later followers — his posse, if you will — imagined they'd seen him. But the leader's wealthy and/or well-connected followers are strangely absent from the narrative. Perhaps they had more information about what had really happened [2].
The early postmortem appearance tales eventually mutated into a legend of a warrior-king, raised from the dead — who would return Real Soon Now, to usher in God's reign and establish Israel's rightful place in Creation [3].
Over decades, the tales percolated into Mediterranean Graeco-Roman culture — eventually mutating further still into a tale of a divine being [4] (perhaps hybridized with that culture's myths?).
> It is very strange the amount of theology that comes solely from Paul's idiosyncratic writings, given that he neither met the prophet in question (Jesus), nor was taught by any of his students (apostles), nor even got along particularly well with any of his students.
It's interesting that every point of this narrative conflicts with the canonical accounts (even excluding the Pauline corpus for this purpose), in which Paul did encounter Jesus, and did at least spend time with (we aren't explicitly told it was spent in study, but presumably it was not exclusively in silent meditation) with disciples of Jesus between the encounter and conversion experience and the start of his ministry, and he got along as well with the other apostles as the other apostles they did with each other.
I chose the words carefully for that reason. The prophet of the nascent religion was a human being who was born, lived and died as a human being. Paul did not encounter this man. In his story, he encounters a divine being, and receives a private revelation (gospel) and mission that is distinct from the revelation and mission that the prophet in question gave as a human to his chosen students (apostles).
Paul is, in this terminology, also a prophet. He explicitly says the revelation he tells is not of human origin, and so not passed down to him through e.g. the ministry of one of the students (apostles) of the prophet in question.
It strikes me as unusual to have so much of the theology coming from someone who simply claims private revelation but is not the prophet in question and when the prophet explicitly chose disciples and set a ministry for them.
Not sure why you refer to the person who visited Paul on the Damascus Road with the term “divine being“ when this divine being as you put it specifically identifies himself as Jesus Christ, whom Paul was persecuting. And there’s further dialogue where Jesus communicates additional information to Paul as to the things he must suffer for Christ’s sake. He should also point out that Paul went over Peter and many of the other disciples to accepting him and his recount of the Damascus Road experience, despite the fact that he persecuted the church and was sending people to jail just prior to this encounte. I would take Paul at his word as faithfully recounted by Luke more than I would take your words as once so far removed, and obviously skeptical of the scriptures themselves. The entire New Testament and Christ life focuses on faith, which is supported by actual historical miracles and healings not to mention in Christ resurrection itself. That’s the whole issue, faith and belief versus skepticism and unbelief. It’s the grand drama that’s the whole point of both Old Testament and New Testament, that sprouts in the garden of Eden, where the serpent casted out on God‘s veracity when describing the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. of course there will be people like you that argue on the side of skepticism and unbelief and that’s been true throughout history so nothing new here
I called him a divine being to describe the kind of experience it was. There was a historical human form of Jesus that the chosen apostles interacted with. In Paul's testimony he encounters Jesus who is not take the form of a historical human anymore and therefore the type of religious experience this is, is one with the divine. I am not making a Christological argument on the full nature of Jesus.
I am Christian btw, but I support bringing historical and documentary rigor to theology. I also haven't actually doubted anything, at least not of Christ. I've just characterized Paul's gospel and mission as coming from a private and separate revelation, unlike the gospels and missions that the original apostles received.
The point that I made based on that is that it is strange that a lot of the theology of Christianity as it develops centuries later is derived more from the exceptional and privately delivered gospel of Paul, rather than from the gospels of the apostles of Jesus when he also held a historical human form.
I think there is also an obvious scholarly reason for this that doesn't even require belief, which is that Paul's writings are the closest documents we have to the time of historical Jesus. However, that also gives reason for us to be cautious in hanging major theological positions on specific sections in Paul that seem absent from or in tension with the synoptic gospels.
So I’m wondering, do you the epistles Paul wrote as less authoritative and scriptural then the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? I just trying to understand the distinctions you are trying to communicate in your responses. Thank you for sharing and I don’t want to continue to make assumptions like I did in my first comment that miss the mark
> Jefferson mashed up/cut and pasted the New Testament to remove any references to the supernatural, or miracles, as well as the divinity of Christ. His title for the book was "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth," which tells us a lot about his motivations.
Walking in Arius' footsteps ...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dnyxy8/thoma...