Given to Matthew Hayes - 05/04/2023

I'd agree with some learned people that Paul's writings were elaborated in the sense that some of the so-called letters of Paul are fakes, and of course, there were plenty of tall tales told about him in, e.g. "The Acts of Paul and Silas". But it becomes very hard to explain why Christians wrote fake letters of Paul, and why they told tall tales about him if he hadn't existed and done some pretty impressive things to begin with (impressive to the early Christians, that is). People who defend this are not familiar with the history of Christianity outside the Roman Empire. When we, Portuguese, came as the first Europeans to Malabar Coast (present day Kerala State) in India, they found an ancient community of Christians who had had nothing to do with Rome or Roman Catholicism. So some people’s theory that the quick wider geographical spread of Christianity was from Rome alone, defies historical testimony which shows otherwise. The Portuguese were the first European explorers of the East. The Portuguese came to Malabar Coast (present day Kerala) in 1500. The ancient Christian community there were under the Patriarch of Babylon and claimed to be evangelized by Apostle Thomas. Thus they had been Christians from the Apostolic era, at the same time Apostle Paul was preaching in Rome and elsewhere.

Put it another way, if we say that Jesus was invented by Paul, but then Paul was invented by Ignatius of Antioch, we are likely to end up saying that Ignatius of Antioch was invented by Athanasius. ROTFL!

Why is Paul accorded such respect by the Christian Church? This can be explained, I think, by the version of Christianity that ultimately emerged triumphant from the petri-dish of different opinions that constituted the Church in the pre-Constantinian era. As I argue elsewhere, the key figure is probably Marcion, a theologian who wanted to bin the entire Old Testament as the work of an inferior deity, and who enshrined Paul as the authentic interpreter of Christian truth. This so alarmed other Christian leaders that - to simplify a complicated story - it prompted them to canonise what is now the Christian Bible - keeping the Old Testament, but also doing as Marcion had done, and enshrining Paul's letters as the key guide to Christian doctrine.

What about the historicity of Paul? No serious scholars of whom I aware doubt this. At least seven of the biblical epistles are universally accepted as having been written by him - and it is also pretty universally accepted that the oldest of them can be dated to within twenty years of the crucifixion. This, by the standards of ancient historiography, is pretty remarkable - the foundational texts of most religions are much, much later than the events they purport to describe. The Pentateuch, for instance, was written hundreds of years after the supposed events of the Exodus; the earliest surviving life of Muhammad almost two centuries after his death; even the Gospels whole decades after the life of Jesus. But with Paul's letters, you are within touching distance of Jesus. Have a look at 1 Corinthians 15.1-9 - this seems to me irrefutable evidence that already, by the time Paul wrote his letter, there was a settled Christian tradition about the resurrection. Which is not, of course, to say that the resurrection actually took place. Whether it did or not is a matter of faith, not of history. But what seems to me very important to bear in mind is that St Paul, even though he is in the Bible, is no less a product of the world of the 1st century AD Roman empire than, say, Caligula or Nero - and the context of history, I think, does indeed provide a way of understanding what it was about him that was so startling and so revolutionary.

You have this guy, Paul, who goes around persuading people to join this new movement, Christianity. After he has set up a Christian church in a town, he keeps in touch by sending letters. So, these churches only exist because some people in the town liked what he had to say, the message that inspired them to become Christians was the message that Paul preached. So of course the preserve his letters, which thus became the first Christian scriptures - authoritative written statements about the Christian message. From their perspective, if Paul had Christianity wrong, what would be the point in being a Christian?

Of course, we know that there were people in the Church who did think that Paul had got things wrong, and they looked to the church in Jerusalem for leadership. However, Jerusalem was destroyed and, over time, the version of Christianity associated with churches that accepted the authority of Paul's letters became the dominant one. Indeed, there was so much reverence for Paul's letters that, as Harris notes, some people created fake letters of Paul. Since many people were persuaded by these fakes, they were included in the New Testament.

One reason it is easy to idealize Jesus is that we have no documents written by him. So whenever anyone encounters something said by Jesus that they don't like, they can always say "Well, how do we know he said that? It sounds like the sort of thing someone would have made up." This is why studying the historical Jesus is hard work, and often reveals more about the scholar, book reviewer, or book blogger than it does about Jesus. On the other hand, knowledge of the context in which Jesus lived means that the scholars do have more grounds to go on than "I like that, so Jesus said it." They can ask whether it is plausible that a 1st Century Jew would have said such words and, if so, what he would have meant.

With Paul though, it is different. There are conservatives who insist that all the letters in the New Testament ascribed to Paul were written by him. But most scholars can agree which letters were definitely written by Paul, which were definitely not by him, and that leaves a few in dispute. Any good introduction to the New Testament - e.g. Stephen L. Harris "The New Testament: A Student's Introduction" will give you a guide as to which is which. So, the chances are that one reason why our picture of Paul is more attractive than our picture of Jesus is simply that it is we’ve got a thing for snake-oil priests (warts and all). We have Jesus as remembered by his followers, but Paul in his own words, FAKES AND ALL. Paul was a salesman, selling his religion that had almost nothing to do with the life of Jesus and his teachings. It was cobbled together from a range of Gnostic, Greek and pagan faiths, and his goal was to make it as Un-Jewish as possible. Hence his so-called inclusiveness. Did I need to say more? ROTFL! ( )