Earliest attestation for Paul's letters?
Posted: Tue Aug 15, 2017 12:15 pm
Is there any attestation for the existence of any of the letters attributed to Paul prior to their having been popularized by Marcion?
Investigating the roots of western civilization (ye olde BC&H forum of IIDB lives on...)
https://earlywritings.com/forum/
______________________________________MrMacSon wrote: ↑Tue Apr 19, 2016 9:25 pm Robert Price refers to the Ignatian corpus as "almost certainly a set of bogus pseudepigrapha, it serves as a prime example of the sort of pious fabrication that forms the martyrdom tradition" when reviewing Candida Moss's The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom HarperOne, 2013.
http://www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com/ ... cution.htm
DCHindley wrote: ↑Tue Sep 22, 2015 5:56 pm
The Idolization of the Virginity of Mary, and the details that are otherwise found in accounts of martyrdoms that seem to date to the 3rd century (this is off the top of my thinly haired head), I'd date them to at least the age of Africanus (the one cited by Eusebius, not the one who wrote the work that commented on his brilliant, if he must say so, reconstruction of Homer), unless you are willing to posit a date of composition for the Protoevangelium of James in the 2nd century (I'm not). Candida Moss puts such romanticized martyrdom accounts to the 4th century or even later.
In The Amazing Colossal Apostle (Dec, 2012; 580 pp) Price proposes that Paul is a composite of several historical figures, including Marcion (of Pontos), Stephen the Martyr, Simon the Sorcerer, and an iconoclastic evangelist who was named Paul. Price claims that Paul's letters were actually written and edited by other people, including Marcion, and Polycarp (of Smyrna).