kyrani99 wrote:Paul is a rogue in my opinion and estimations. He wrote fiction and it is being kind to call it simply fiction.

With Watson serving as a narrator, readers get a first person account of Sherlock and his character traits and habits, which somehow become more believable because they are conveyed through a real person, and not an omniscient presence.

kyrani99 wrote: I see circumstantial evidence for the existence of some preacher, Paul or whoever.

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The Perils of Pauline Studies
"At the dawn of the twenty-first century, it is a strange time for Pauline studies. After seemingly having run out of other ideas to beat to death, the academy has ventured into new territory. One might even say that, on analogy with the intrepid Netherlanders of old, Pauline scholars have created new territory to settle. A visit to the seminary book store or the religion aisle at Barnes & Noble will acquaint the reader with books arguing that Paul was a culture critic of Hellenistic Judaism, that he was a Jew and remained a Jew, that he wrote against U.S. foreign policy, and so on. Indeed, more than ever, he seems like a new Oracle of Delphi whose equivocal utterances may be read as conveying whatever message one most wants to hear. Like the infamous “historical Jesus,” Paul has become a reflection of the scholars studying him.

"Part of the reason for this state of affairs is that Jesus has recently been unavailable for these uses. As scholars have become more skeptical about recovering the goods on the historical Jesus (as witness the Jesus Seminar’s claim that only 18 percent of the sayings database was reliable), the less plausible it has seemed to make him the poster boy for green politics, feminism, whatever. Granted, this hasn’t stopped a number of scholars who still write books manufacturing and manicuring Jesus to look like them, since the less evidence there is, the more room is left for speculation; but some have retreated to Paul instead. Perhaps he can be the bulwark theologians once thought they had in Jesus. But great ironies lie this way.

"First, the closer scrutiny the Pauline texts receive, the clearer it becomes (and by now it seems mighty clear indeed) that the epistles present us with many of the same challenges the Gospels did. They appear to be filled with the same variety of redactional seams, non-sequiturs, and double-audience rhetorical tricks we find in the Gospels. In short, the historical Jesus problem replicates itself in the case of Paul. The epistles reveal themselves to the discerning reader to have exactly the same sort of limitations as the Gospels do: both are collections of fragments and pericopae contributed and fabricated by authors and communities of very different theological leanings. Both present barriers to the access of the individuals under whose names they appear, not open doors."

https://www.amazon.de/The-Amazing-Colos ... nskepti-21

"In 'The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul' [2012; Signature Books, Salt Lake City; 580 pages], Robert M Price suggests that Paul is a composite of several historical figures, including Marcion of Pontos, Stephen the Martyr, Simon the Sorcerer, and [an] iconoclastic evangelist who was named Paul. His letters were actually written and edited by other people, including Marcion, and an early Church Father, Polycarp of Smyrna ...

"The story of Paul in the Book of Acts is not evident in Paul’s epistles. Acts contains fanciful “miracle-mongering” motifs, including a resurrected Jesus who walks through walls and people who can make earthquakes happen through prayer. In fact, only in the Book of Acts do we have twelve apostles. Paul’s letters mention more apostles, some of them female. In the early Christian church, there were other sources of information about Paul which were for a time canonical, including Acts of Paul and Acts of Paul and Thecla ...

"Some of the early Church Fathers, such as Justin Martyr, never even mentioned Paul in their extensive writings, so it is debatable whether or not Christians in Justin’s day had heard of Paul ...

"In the final analysis, according to Price, the canonical writings are not only infused with the hand of Marcion and Polycarp, as many scholars would acknowledge*, but are an amalgam of biographical details derived from the other Christian martyrs’ lives ..."

http://signaturebooks.com/new-testament ... y-existed/

* eg. Joseph B Tyson, Matthias Klinghardt, & Markus Vinzent

RealityRules wrote:

"In 'The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul' [2012; Signature Books, Salt Lake City; 580 pages], Robert M Price suggests that Paul is a composite of several historical figures, including Marcion of Pontos, Stephen the Martyr, Simon the Sorcerer, and [an] iconoclastic evangelist who was named Paul. His letters were actually written and edited by other people, including Marcion, and an early Church Father, Polycarp of Smyrna ...

"The story of Paul in the Book of Acts is not evident in Paul’s epistles. Acts contains fanciful “miracle-mongering” motifs, including a resurrected Jesus who walks through walls and people who can make earthquakes happen through prayer. In fact, only in the Book of Acts do we have twelve apostles. Paul’s letters mention more apostles, some of them female. In the early Christian church, there were other sources of information about Paul which were for a time canonical, including Acts of Paul and Acts of Paul and Thecla ...

"Some of the early Church Fathers, such as Justin Martyr, never even mentioned Paul in their extensive writings, so it is debatable whether or not Christians in Justin’s day had heard of Paul ...

"In the final analysis, according to Price, the canonical writings are not only infused with the hand of Marcion and Polycarp, as many scholars would acknowledge*, but are an amalgam of biographical details derived from the other Christian martyrs’ lives ..."

http://signaturebooks.com/new-testament ... y-existed/

* eg. Joseph B Tyson, Matthias Klinghardt, & Markus Vinzent