Posted: Jun 16, 2017 2:21 am
by Leucius Charinus
RealityRules wrote:
tanya wrote:
RealityRules wrote:
Ben C.Smith wrote:"that there was both an historical Jesus and a mythical Jesus. A shorthand way of putting this might be that there was an historical Jesus, but Paul did not know about him." http://www.earlywritings.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3125

    Question: How does Ben, or anyone else know anything about “Paul”?

    ... who was “Paul” ? Where he is attested, apart from early patristic sources of dubious origin..


"In 'The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul'1 (2012) 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 conjecture that Paul is somehow related to Simon Magus is one subscribed to by Robert Price. The history of this conjecture AFAIK goes back to .... [from WIKI] ... "Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860), founder of the Tübingen School, drew attention to the anti-Pauline characteristic in the Pseudo-Clementines, and pointed out that in the disputations between Simon and Peter, some of the claims Simon is represented as making (e.g. that of having seen the Lord, though not in his lifetime, yet subsequently in vision) were really the claims of Paul; and urged that Peter's refutation of Simon was in some places intended as a polemic against Paul. "

There is a problem with this conjecture in that Baur and all who followed him (including Harnack) presumed that the Clementine Literature was at least as old as the 3rd century because it was apparently cited by Origen. However since the turn of the 20th century, and particularly since the turn of the 21st century (often European) scholarship has understood that the citation in Origen was actually created by the editorial hands of Basil and Gregory in the later 4th century, and thus the first attestation to the Clementines is from Eusebius. Modern scholarship sees the Clementines as being authored by an Arian c.330 CE.

I have asked Robert Price (in his FB followers page - Bible Geeks) if this revised dating essentially demolishes any link between Simon and Paul, but have received no substantial response.

FWIW I believe there is good reason to investigate the conjecture that Arius of Alexandria authored the Clementine literature.