Freethought Nation

Ken Humphreys and you should read "James the Brother of Jesus" by Robert Eisenman. Saul was "consenting in the death" of "Stephen" because "Stephen" was JAMES, and not Stephen. It occurred in 62 BCE, long after Jesus was gone.

Paul the Apostle Full Movie*

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i just watched a video debate between ken humphreys and habermas in which habermas gives the "accepted" dates of paul as follows:

two years post crucifixion--his conversion
5 years post crucifixion--the first epistles


this sounds all well and good, but a moment's reflection brings up something interesting. paul is a former self-professed persecutor of the christians. well given that his conversion is so close to jesus' death, just how big was christianity that believers in jesus had their own detractors? my readings on the era explain that during that time the christians were indistinguishable from jews....and jews were treated fairly.

but let's assume that paul, or saul at this point, had heard of christians and was hell bent on persecuting them. this puts his persecutions almost assuredly being contemporaneous with the life of jesus. the only way for this to happen is for him to have encountered enough people who had heard jesus speak and persecute them. that puts him only a couple of degrees of separation from the man himself. furthermore, if he were such an avid persecutor during the life of jesus, it follows that he would have surely attended his crucifixion and witnessed the wonders of it (the massive eclipse that lasted three hours and the zombie apocalypse). yet none of this firsthand information makes it into the epistles. paul writes his provenance to christianity as "i was really into persecuting them until i had a vision on the road one day." why would he have left out the real meat to his witness? that would be like me trying to sell you elvis's underwear by telling you that i found them on the street with his name on the waistband.....when in reality i had seen elvis take said underwear off and give them to me!!

but let's assume, for charity's sake, that saul was late to the party. maybe he didn't start feeding christians to kitties until after jesus died. what do we think transpired during these persecutions? did the christians try to explain their faith at all to saul? is it reasonable to think that saul had not heard the story of jesus of nazareth umpteen times during his persecutions? it is simply impossible that he was unfamiliar with the man. so the epistles portray a man trying to convince believers in other cities that his version of christ is true, yet he fails to use any of his own personal experiences to bolster his message other than claims of "direct revelation" by god.

there are only two responsible conclusions to make from this.

1. early christians did not believe in a historical jesus, so saul would have never heard of him during his persecutions. he only would know of christ as spiritual son of god. this is the most favorable reading for the historicity of paul, yet it is damning for the case for jesus.

2. there never was a paul, hence the inconsistencies with the story.

from this it appears christians are on the horns of a pretty nasty dilemma. they must choose who didn't exist, paul or jesus.

The following post someone circulated on my Christ Con Yahoo group sounds like good reasoning.

I would submit that the story of the trip to the East - as possibly based on midrash - was included in the "life" of the fictional composite "Paul" because it was a tale told about Apollonius of Tyana and/or Pythagoras, etc.

As we can see, the biblical tales are based demonstrably on pre-Christian mythology, legends and midrash.

It's good to see other people thinking in this manner.

http://www.truthbeknown.com/apollonius.html

Quote:

In any case, another one of the key anchors to date Paul is yet shown unreliable.

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Why suffer from Egyptoparallelophobia, when you can read Christ in Egypt? Try it - you'll like it:

Acharya,

fascinating stuff, for sure. I want to hear more on Paul, as I also suspect he is fictional. I just finished rewriting my book, The Bible says 'Saviors' - Obadiah 1:21. I want to send it to you to read at your leisure. It is in the vein of Robert Eisenman (a friend of mine now), who wrote "James the Brother of Jesus". In my book, chapter Six, the newly added chapter, I show TEN characters who cover for James, to write him out of history. I just today found another one in Eisenman's new book, James and the Dead Sea Scrolls Vol 1: Centurion Cornelius. He takes on attributes of James found in Josephus, according to Eisenman. This is going to be important information for further study. I, for one, am going to!

This is the original book:

http://www.amazon.com/Saviors-Beyond-Qu ... 738&sr=1-1

Email me at sahansdal/yahoo and I'll pdf file it to you.

In my reading of Acts, Paul was in it for the money. He was a bounty hunter.

Also the Paul of Acts is not the Paul of the epistles. In one of the letters Peter (Cephias) is reluctant to eat with Gentiles for unclean foods and Paul makes an argument to do so. The Paul of Acts learned of the miracle that there were no longer any unclean foods. The Paule of Acts would have reminded Peter of the miracle.

My view of the author of the five long epistles thought to be Paul is that he existed simply from the body of the text. He was not the Paul of Acts.

Now if you read the letters he is clearly saying the end is not only nigh it is some time next week. To any rational Christian he got the central message all wrong. If he got that wrong no rational person would take him seriously on anything else. Christians are not rational.

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