stephan happy huller wrote:Again I don't know why if you have Marcion and the Tatianites and many others rejecting Acts as a 'spurious codex' (De Recta in Deum Fide) and specifically denying the Catholic version of Paul and their Pauline collection how people can walk around with such certainty about who Paul was.
Once you've set aside the authenticity of the epistles and the veracity of the Acts (of the Apostles & of Paul), you do indeed have nothing (with overtures of Simon Magus being just the only sliver of light in a very dark room). Outside of these sources...
Paul shows up first as some shadowy writer of letters who is known by no other means, an epistolary apostle who mention Ephesians everywhere (Ignatius), wrote one letter to the Corinthians (Clement), and wrote multiple letters to Philippians (Polycarp). The Scillitan martyrs refer to 'books and epistles of Paul, a just man.' Abercius of Hierapolis on his tomb warbles about 'Having Paul as a companion, everywhere faith led the way.' In the second half of the second century, you see him already the subject of misunderstanding while being elevated to scripture in 2 Peter, where Paul 'in all his letters, speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to understand, which the untaught and unstable distort, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures, to their own destruction.'
Famously, Tertullian wrestles with Paul, callling him the "apostle of the heretics" (A.M. 3.5), siding with Acts over the Epistles to say that Paul needed the blessing of the Twelve for authority, and even introducing the hypothetical that Paul may be a false prophet of "your other god" (the Demiurge) in his polemic. Clement of Alexandria affirms his affinity to another "heretic" and "Gnostic" who was in Rome in the first half of the second century, this time Valentinus, who is claimed to have apostolic succession to Paul through Theudas (Strom. 7.17). Notably Irenaeus challenges the heretics to produce any better lineage than that of Peter and Clement or John and Polycarp, not attempting to find authority in Paul, and Hippolytus of Rome tells of the apostolic succession of the Twelve without mentioning Paul. Polycrates of Ephesus refers to John and several other bishops as their founding figures, but not Paul, who was supposed to have labored originally in the region. The Apocalypse of John shows no sign of knowing the apostle who preached to the churches addressed.
Instead his fame first emerges in the see of Rome, where Valentinus and Marcion taught, and where he is paired off with Peter by their catholic opponents, undoubtedly to squelch his heretical overtones and bring him into harmony with the emerging catholic church. This is seen in both pseudepigrapha claimed to witness Paul's existence, 1 Clement and the Ignatiana, which both speak of Paul and Peter together in the same breath, a situation that can be seen as very simply derivative of the domestication of Paul effected by the Acts of Apostles in which Paul is subordinated to the Twelve, whereby we cannot date either of these texts any sooner than we can date the Acts of the Apostles itself (nor can we understand correctly why their knowledge of Peter and Paul is so muted and entirely mediated by prior literary forms except that the authors knew both Peter and Paul through books).
"... almost every critical biblical position was earlier advanced by skeptics." - Raymond Brown
