Stephen said
Porphyry wroteHere is the thing–forget about the controversial, and let’s grant for the moment “remote,” possibility that Paul was simply a charlatan who didn’t believe any of it and was just in it for money. Let’s assume he really was a true believer. He still might not be reliable in relating such details. Sometimes true believers lie to establish their credentials in order to spread a message that they are sincerely convinced is true. In fact, that kind of lying about credentials in order to advance the “truth” looks to have been pretty common in early Christianity; just look at pseudepigraphal authors.
I’m sincerely not trying to be an asshole. Everyone who reads the New Testament has to wrestle with Paul because he’s such an important figure. Everyone has to arrive at their own conclusion. There is no substitute for diving in yourself. Why be satisfied with someone else’s opinion? There are some questions that can only be answered by you. And you will never be absolutely sure about anything.
brenmcg, have I got a ** you do not have permission to see this link ** for you!
CEJ expostulated
This place is dead.
Places don’t die. But people do. Life is too short to spend it living under a bridge.
I’ve been accused of many things. Fortunately, none of them were ever proved beyond a reasonable doubt, including those morals charges in Kansas City. Admittedly that was a close call, though.
But a troll? Really?
JAS said
Porphyry said
Is this some inside joke that only the regulars get?
I can only guess that Steefen (not to be confused with Stephen) has not been posting with his usual frequency, and CEJ is easily bored.
It is August, CEJ — vacation time! Most of the really smart people are at the beach somewhere.
The really smart people wouldn’t let me go with them.
Stephen said
We have no access to the motives of these ancient writers* so any hypothesis predicated on such knowledge is a non-starter. Consequently we are more or less forced to take these accounts at face value. Anything is possible but having spent years reading Paul and his imitators in the NT my impression is that he is a perfectly honest fanatic. Of course he is self-aggrandizing as anyone would be who thought they were chosen by God. All we have to go on is the text. What makes anyone think he is a con man? Be specific.
* Historical critical scholarship treats Paul just like any other ancient author. Paul is only being treated specially by fundamentalists.
I was about to say I do think he is a charlatan but with the motive always about making Paul feel like he is special and important. The corruption is not of money or even praise but of self ego. He believes his fabrications and those fabrications all center on how chosen he is.
Porphyry said
Stephen said
I’m sincerely not trying to be an asshole. Everyone who reads the New Testament has to wrestle with Paul because he’s such an important figure. Everyone has to arrive at their own conclusion. There is no substitute for diving in yourself. Why be satisfied with someone else’s opinion? There are some questions that can only be answered by you. And you will never be absolutely sure about anything.
I don’t plan simply to be content with other people’s conclusions. But I am interested in understanding the arguments and evidence that drove other people–people who have thought about this a lot longer than I have–to the conclusions they reached.
When I’m researching a new question, I generally start by trying to figure out what other people have already established (or attempted to establish)–not because I will blindly take their word for it but so I can examine the arguments they have made and save myself time badly reinventing the wheel. Usually in the embryonic stage of the research this means looking at introductory summaries and chatting with people who are up to speed on the field and who know the status quaestionis. If it proceeds further, it turns into something like a full lit review.
I don’t just take people’s conclusions as settled. Sometime experts in a field reach some really really tenuous and poorly-founded conclusions, and those conclusions get parroted as established though they aren’t. Experts can sometimes get out in front of their skis. I’m aware of this.
But still, the experts are experts for a reason. There are times that they come to a problem that seems–on first glance–utterly intractable, and yet find a very nearly conclusive argument for one solution. E.g., I think some of the arguments for Markan priority (particularly with respect to Matthew) are really extremely compelling.
Given that there are people who have dedicated their lives to the professional study of Paul, it seems insanely delusional to ignore what they have accomplished and just read the epistles for myself without consideration of their positions and arguments. I honestly don’t understand why that would draw criticism–unless you have the impression that I haven’t already read Paul myself?
We are talking about history, not a choose your own adventure book.
And certainly there are unanswerable questions–lots of things I’d like to know have been irrecoverably lost to history. There may also be questions where all we will ever have is a best guess, which despite being best still isn’t very good. But I like to know what I don’t know. Did Matthew use Mark? Almost certainly. Did Luke use Matthew? Maybe. Did Luke use Josephus? Unlikely, and if he did we might never know for sure. Etc.
I appreciate your comments here.
I just want to randomly add i think the view he knows josephus is strong
Given that there are people who have dedicated their lives to the professional study of Paul, it seems insanely delusional to ignore what they have accomplished and just read the epistles for myself without consideration of their positions and arguments.
Is that really what I wrote?
He believes his fabrications and those fabrications all center on how chosen he is.
You’re not a charlatan if you actually believe what you’re preaching. Porphyry can correct me if he had another idea in mind but to me a con man is someone who is consciously intentionally making an effort to deceive. I do not believe Paul’s message but I suspect Paul actually did.
Folks can I be honest? After way too many years of reading him I have become profoundly bored with Paul. But if you’re going to grapple with him good luck. You may wish to start ** you do not have permission to see this link **.
And now, like the ** you do not have permission to see this link ** in Völuspá, I sink down.
Stephen said
“Given that there are people who have dedicated their lives to the professional study of Paul, it seems insanely delusional to ignore what they have accomplished and just read the epistles for myself without consideration of their positions and arguments.”Is that really what I wrote?
When I asked what reasons have lead people to hold a particular view of Paul, you have repeatedly asked why I don’t just read the texts for myself. Either that is off-topic (unwarrantedly assuming that I haven’t and won’t read the texts, but that I intend just accept other people’s conclusions about Paul blindly) or it implies that I shouldn’t consider what others have argued.
Stephen said
“Now, you’ve drawn from your study of the texts the conclusion that he is honest. My question is what did you find in the text that led you to that conclusion and ruled out the alternative?”
I happy to do so but if you are undecided wouldn’t it be better if you studied the text and came to your own conclusion?
Note that you set them up as alternatives (“but wouldn’t it be better”): either you could answer my question about why you hold the conclusion you do, or I could read the text myself and reach my own conclusion. As I said at the time, the two aren’t mutually exclusive; I can read the text myself, and also consider your (and others’) arguments, and decide for myself whether your arguments are persuasive in light of the text.
Stephen said
Everyone has to arrive at their own conclusion. There is no substitute for diving in yourself. Why be satisfied with someone else’s opinion? There are some questions that can only be answered by you.
Again, you ask me why be satisfied with someone else’s opinion. I never said I would be. That question only makes sense if you are setting up some absurd dichotomy between, on the one hand, reading the text myself (without considering what other people have said) and, on the other, slavishly following what other people have said (without considering the text).
The only other way I can think to read these comments is that you simply think there is no truth of the matter, and that there can be no objective reasons to hold any conclusion. People might make arguments but at the end of the day the arguments and reasons are just performative, and really we each just pick our own truth. There is no true or mistaken, justified or unjustified, there is only what we decide to believe.
Porphyry said
Do any serious scholars think that Paul might have been a charlatan and con-man, and if not, why do they set aside that possibility?Scholars–it seems to me, as a non-specialist–seem to think the most reliable information we have about Paul is to be found in his own undisputed letters. They seem–again, to me, a non-specialist–to presume that Paul is sincere and that he relates the facts of his life accurately, at least according to his own memory.
But given the nature of those letters, it seems naive to take them at face value. Paul regularly asks for money (think of his collection for the poor); he spends a lot of time trying to establish his credentials, often with “humble-bragging” as the kids call it these days; and frequently what he brags about is stuff the recipients of the letter would not have seen–they would only have his word.
But given that we only have his side of the story, why would we trust him against his detractors (e.g., the super-apostles)? Why exclude the possibility that Paul was a charlatan? There is, after all, nothing remarkable about religious con-men; they are really common in every era.
I’m convinced Paul was a con man. He went to a city to convince people about the meaning of this Jesus guy’s death, collected money from them and did the same thing in the next city, and sent his partners back to cities he started churches in to collect more money “for charity”.
If someone did this today, you’d call him a con man so why should we treat Paul any differently? Because he was the most successful at it?
It's been awhile since I read it, but Dr. Tabor's "Paul and Jesus: How The Apostle Transformed Christianity" gave me this impression as well.
JAS said
Begging money from a small, struggling starter movement with no clear direction and one that was actively being persecuted at the time does not seem to me like a very likely prospect. If one is going to go the con man route, there were certainly far more viable options at the time.We also don’t usually propose hypotheses (which are in essence assertions) without good reason. And historians do use autobiographies all the time, if they can get them. Do they assume that they contain a certain amount of unreliable information and bragging? Of course, but secondary sources are also often unreliable. Doing history is a challenge; and ancient history even more so.
There is zero evidence outside of Paul’s own writings and the NT written after his death that he was persecuted.
But even if he was persecuted somehow, look at Jim Jones and David Koresh for a modern example of a con men willing to suffer persecution to be cult leaders.
JAS said
And how will you investigate it? We do not get a lot of competing or verifying accounts in ancient history, especially for someone who really would not have been considered very important outside of a movement that was itself not very important at the time. It is likely to be personal responses to the little information we have, which is mostly the NT itself. And you are really primarily trying to assess internal motivations. That seems to me an insurmountable problem in making a case.
How is that any worse than simply accepting the word of someone who started a cult?
Adnantell said
It has nothing to do with Paul being a fraud a lunatic or whatever. The question can be on the fundamental grounds of why privilege this man’s thoughts besides he’s really the only guy we got. The problem is if you are willing to reject Paul then you aren’t really left with shit it seems and so your field of studies doesn’t exist without him.
That’s false – Paul being a fraud changes very little for historians.
Porphyry said
Stephen said
We have no access to the motives of these ancient writers* so any hypothesis predicated on such knowledge is a non-starter. Consequently we are more or less forced to take these accounts at face value.
I don’t see why speculation about motives is necessarily a non-starter, and I certainly don’t see why the historical method would require us to read these at face-value. It seems to me we speculate about people’s motives all the time; even though we often lack any direct access to individuals’ interior motives, we can still look at their actions and see if they are consistent with some motive which is itself plausible given their situation.
For example, I think it almost certain that Joseph Smith was a con-man. I think he was simply making up the revelations he claimed to have, and I think interpreting him as a sincere fanatic stretches credulity past the breaking point once everything has been considered.
At any rate, the question, as I see it, really boils down to “was Paul sincere or not? Was he acting in good faith or not? Did he believe what he claimed (e.g., that he had seen the risen Lord)?” That is ultimately not something we can directly know, but I don’t see how your saying he was an honest fanatic is more objective than saying he was a dishonest con. Either thesis would require knowing what was in his mind, which we can’t directly know.
And I seriously doubt that in Paul’s case we can answer for certain one way or the other, which is sort of the point. Why do scholars seem to dismiss one option (that he was a con), and assume the alternative (he was honest and sincere)? What is the basis for thinking him sincere and honest given that the other seems to be a real possibility consistent with the facts and with what we know about human nature?
What makes anyone think he is a con man? Be specific.
I’m not saying he is a con man, I’m just saying it seems like a very real possibility (for reasons summarized earlier) that would deserve to be kept alive.
The difference between Paul and Joseph Smith is time.
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