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Paul is a heroic apostle with many lives. Most of them were rejected at an early stage, and there are two supposedly true biographies in the NT canon. Acts and a collection of Paul’s letters known as the Corpus. Today’s biblical scholars reject the historicity and authenticity of much of these writings. I reject all of them with a simple maneuver – changing the evaluation criteria. 

Gunther Zuntz stated that biblically and historically, we only have access to a collection of letters called the Corpus around AD 100. This date was established by dating testimonies about Paul and his letters from the patristic literature. Marcion already had the Corpus – whether he composed it himself or inherited it is not important. Marcion’s activity popularized Paweł so much that he became indispensable. You could fight Marcon, but there was no point in fighting Paweł, despite the fact that there was a lot of embarrassing content in his Corpus.

The second testimony about Paul is the Acts of the Apostles, now dated 100-150 CE. Let me remind you that Adolf von Harnack dated them to 65 CE. Luke, the author of Acts, did not like Paul’s Letters, but he did like him. And he created his biography of Paul regardless of the content of the Letters.

Basically we have two officially recognized biographies of Paul that contradict each other. One from the Acts and the other from the Letters. An independent and independent Paul, and an obedient Paul to people who said they knew the Lord.

Judith Lieu claims that Marcion did not know the Acts, and the earliest evidence of their existence dates back to 170 CE. Taking into account the opinion of A.von Harnack that the anti-Marcial discussion dominated early Christian literature in the years 150-180 CE, it can be stated that the Acts were written around 150 CE.

So what happened between the 50th and 100th years? Nothing happened from what the Letters describe, because it is also an invented tradition like the one in Acts or the correspondence with Seneca, or the adventures with Thecla. The movement developed in an uncontrolled manner which meant a multitude of different stories. Around 100, an unknown writer fascinated by the new religious movement, seeing on the one hand great potential in all these uncoordinated activities, and on the other hand a whole spectrum of weak ideas, according to him, decided to create his own version. He did not travel, he did not work physically, he did not establish a congregation. He just sat, thought and wrote. He chose what fascinated him, he rejected what he considered uninteresting, he added his own concepts. Our Author was not so brazen as to point out the concrete historical contact of the imaginary figure of Paul with the earthly Jesus. His hero experienced the revelation, just as Ptolemy had a dream of Serapis. Isn’t it elegant? Even though these made up stories were on the market, he decided to cut himself off from them. At the most, it turns out that those gospels are lame and Paweł’s vision will not lose its beauty.

The author of Paul’s letters was skeptical about the earthly Jesus. Nothing unusual. Their market potential was not yet visible and they came from the popular imagination and religiosity alien to its sophistication. Cheeky gossip sold to the little ones by the smarts. (The same happened to Islam in its early development – the mass production of Muhammad’s alleged adventures.) Our Author created Paul the heroic apostle whom Jesus Christ visited in revelation. An apostle with a colossal scope, acting in a spectacular and literary magnificent way, which is life unreal and incomprehensible. But to find out, you have to live a bit of life outside the academy and library. Later, the Author’s buddies cut it up and glued it together, and this is how the Corpus was created, consisting of very diverse and uneven writings.

Why was that so? It was so because even such geniuses as the creator of Paweł, need the environment and getting to know the works of their predecessors or competitors.

The first self trials are always difficult and full of “golden tablets in ancient Egypt” (Mormons and J. Smith). In early Christianity, these “” golden tablets” were 80% of the stories, letters, and apocalypses. Later, more sophisticated solutions come as successive iterations of the development process. And it is so in every area. 

The same is with Paul- he is just conceptually too “good” at the starting point of a movement. You can see that he knows too much. 

At the same time, he is too lame to undertake the real steps of establishing a real mission and remotely managing a network of communities. He never did. Everything he writes about his endeavors is only good for readers who do not have such experience, and that is the trap. The dating of the Letters on the basis of the content of the text is not any evidence that would preclude the thesis that in the narrative layer we have a completely made up story. Bible scholars say strong hints of historicity. But why not the premises of the same literary fiction that is ubiquitous in the letters. Not to mention the prevailing general tendency to give false copyright attribution to all papers, which was the only rule of thumb in the game. It indicates a certain imposed consensus within which the rivalry took place. Letters signed by real authors were either rejected or their attributions changed. Orthodox and Catholic Christians were very flexible. If Paul grew thanks to the enemy Marcion, then beat Tertullian. You have to take control of character development yourself.

As for the churches of Paul, no one even remembered about them. In the cities where they were supposed to be, there were active Catholic communities much later, who did not remember their supposed predecessors. On the other hand, the made-up memory of them is an excellent marketing trick for Marion’s new missionaries pointing out that here we are returning to Corinth, we will be in Rome, in Thessaloniki. Because we were there.

So much for Paul. Above is a card from Zuntz.