Brodie vs Carrier on historicity of NT Paul

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maryhelena
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Re: Brodie vs Carrier on historicity of NT Paul

Post by maryhelena »

Leucius Charinus wrote:Does Brodie mention or address the common hypothesis that these authors were Jewish?

Thanks for any information.



LC
Pete, seems not. Perhaps taking it as a given that Jewish writers were involved.

I've just received Brodie's earlier book - The Birthing of the New Testament - so will keep an eye out for anything related to your question when I get around to reading it. This book is almost as door-stop a book as Carrier' book. It's very technical/scholarly - I've heard it's the first 9 chapters that are worth the price of the book - the rest being very highly detailed research - so hard work for the brain.... ;)
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
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Leucius Charinus
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Re: Brodie vs Carrier on historicity of NT Paul

Post by Leucius Charinus »

maryhelena wrote:
Leucius Charinus wrote:Does Brodie mention or address the common hypothesis that these authors were Jewish?

Thanks for any information.



LC
Pete, seems not. Perhaps taking it as a given that Jewish writers were involved.
Ta. !
I've just received Brodie's earlier book - The Birthing of the New Testament - so will keep an eye out for anything related to your question when I get around to reading it. This book is almost as door-stop a book as Carrier' book. It's very technical/scholarly - I've heard it's the first 9 chapters that are worth the price of the book - the rest being very highly detailed research - so hard work for the brain.... ;)
I look forward to a summary debriefing when you have digested Brodie's earlier ideas.

Father Brodie. Bless his little cotton sox.



LC
A "cobbler of fables" [Augustine]; "Leucius is the disciple of the devil" [Decretum Gelasianum]; and his books "should be utterly swept away and burned" [Pope Leo I]; they are the "source and mother of all heresy" [Photius]
Solo
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Re: Brodie vs Carrier on historicity of NT Paul

Post by Solo »

People who are have absolute convictions of the correctness of their beliefs and preferences will not be dissuaded by logical argument. The arguments that I have seen for the fictitious character of Paul do not appreciate the myriad of difficulties with this position. While there is indeed a possibility that Jesus did not exist at all and a strong likelihood that the historical trace of him is mostly or completely a literary fiction, the case for Christians inventing Paul is hard to fathom. Who would do that and to what purpose ? Was that one person - the textual analysis of the "genuine" Paulines suggests on the whole, it was - or a team ? Who would authorize such work and how would it have gained acceptance ? Were the "inventor(s)" of Paul , proto-orthodox Christians or Marcionite docetists ? If the former, why would the nascent church insist making Paul such a difficult figure - one obviously at odds with the Jewish proto-Christian movement, and even his own "official" church biography (Acts) ? If the latter, why would Marcionites paint a "Jewish" Paul who had absolutely no knowledge of the Demiurge or insist on a material foundation of spirituality (1 Cor 15:44) ? Now even if people want to argue that parts of Paul were created by the Catholics and parts by Marcionites, it remains to be shown how the corpus (of the seven "genuine" letters) magically settled into a shape that could be used by both, the orthodox and by the heretics. Now who could possibly redact Paul that way and why ?

And this is just scratching the surface. If the Pauline corpus originated in the second century why would the seven letters have markers of the church organization and development and ideas of the parousia different than the Deuteropaulines ? The sophistication of this fraud would be mind-boggling.

Another point, and one that Richard Carrier does not seem to have a handle on: there are certain features of Paul that would be hard to fake, and I hold, were not faked because they formed part and parcel of his medical profile of which he was not aware. Carrier provides a hilarious duplicate of Calvin Coolidge definition of unemployment ("when you have too many men out of work, unemployment results"). On p. 126 of his OtHoJ, he opines that "schizophrenia results when your biological propensity to hallucinate is ramped up to such an extreme that it interferes with your ability to function". No, that is incorrect: schizophrenia (or unemployment, for that matter) cannot be said to be the effect of the symptoms that describe it. That is classical tautology. I am surprised that Carrier, who is bright and technically competent would make such a silly statement.

At any rate, the genuine Paul often made appeal to shared experiences, especially afflictions, his humiliation by God, denied a sense of shame and spoke of abnormal states of mind that he attributed to the working of the revelatory process but that we know would have been seen as mental illness (possession) by outsiders. These effects are absent in the later attempts to be Paul, or they are misapprehended, as in the insert of 1 Cor 15:3-11. Paul refuses to be shamed by the external view of himself and considers the periods of incapacity or reduced capacity to be part and parcel of the "sufficient grace" he received from Christ. The interpolator who himself did not experience the exalted states, did not grasp that Paul would not bend his knee to other "apostles" because he believed they came directly from God, unmediated. Hence the un-Pauline feel of the insert, with what appears a hostile comment on Paul's swearing he received his commission from his mother's womb (Gal 1:15), by calling Paul's birth ektromati ("aborted").

Best,
Jiri
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maryhelena
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Re: Brodie vs Carrier on historicity of NT Paul

Post by maryhelena »

Solo wrote:People who are have absolute convictions of the correctness of their beliefs and preferences will not be dissuaded by logical argument. The arguments that I have seen for the fictitious character of Paul do not appreciate the myriad of difficulties with this position. While there is indeed a possibility that Jesus did not exist at all and a strong likelihood that the historical trace of him is mostly or completely a literary fiction, the case for Christians inventing Paul is hard to fathom. Who would do that and to what purpose ? Was that one person - the textual analysis of the "genuine" Paulines suggests on the whole, it was - or a team ? Who would authorize such work and how would it have gained acceptance ? Were the "inventor(s)" of Paul , proto-orthodox Christians or Marcionite docetists ? If the former, why would the nascent church insist making Paul such a difficult figure - one obviously at odds with the Jewish proto-Christian movement, and even his own "official" church biography (Acts) ? If the latter, why would Marcionites paint a "Jewish" Paul who had absolutely no knowledge of the Demiurge or insist on a material foundation of spirituality (1 Cor 15:44) ? Now even if people want to argue that parts of Paul were created by the Catholics and parts by Marcionites, it remains to be shown how the corpus (of the seven "genuine" letters) magically settled into a shape that could be used by both, the orthodox and by the heretics. Now who could possibly redact Paul that way and why ?

And this is just scratching the surface. If the Pauline corpus originated in the second century why would the seven letters have markers of the church organization and development and ideas of the parousia different than the Deuteropaulines ? The sophistication of this fraud would be mind-boggling.


Best,
Jiri
Fraud? Nonsense - people write stories all the time without being accused of fraud....
It's not a criminal offence to write a story..... :confusedsmiley:
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
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MrMacSon
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Re: Brodie vs Carrier on historicity of NT Paul

Post by MrMacSon »

Solo wrote: ... the case for Christians inventing Paul is hard to fathom. Who would do that and to what purpose ? Was that one person - the textual analysis of the "genuine" Paulines suggests on the whole, it was - or a team ?
It's likely teams in scriptoria were increasingly active & prominent at the time.

Solo wrote: Who would authorize such work and how would it have gained acceptance ?
It didn't have to be authorized, other than by the leader/s of the scriptorium.

Were the "inventor(s)" of Paul, proto-orthodox Christians or Marcionite docetists ? If the former, why would the nascent church insist making Paul such a difficult figure - one obviously at odds with the Jewish proto-Christian movement, and even his own "official" church biography (Acts) ? If the latter, why would Marcionites paint a "Jewish" Paul who had absolutely no knowledge of the Demiurge or insist on a material foundation of spirituality (1 Cor 15:44) ?
AD Loman proposed the Pauline texts arose out of a Gnostic-Christian community/scriptorium [or two]
(while the NT Gospels arose out of a Jewish-Christian community/scriptorium).

Now, even if people want to argue that parts of Paul were created by the Catholics and parts by Marcionites, it remains to be shown how the corpus (of the seven "genuine" letters) magically settled into a shape that could be used by both, the orthodox and by the heretics. Now who could possibly redact Paul that way and why ?
AD Loman proposed these two groups were vehement adversaries theologically. Redaction occurred as part of resolution of the adversary.
(It's likely there were other groups with other theologies - Docetists and other Gnostics would have been active, too)

Solo wrote: And this is just scratching the surface. If the Pauline corpus originated in the second century why would the seven letters have markers of the church organization and development and ideas of the parousia different than the Deuteropaulines ? The sophistication of this fraud would be mind-boggling.
maryhelena wrote: Fraud? Nonsense - people write stories all the time without being accused of fraud....
It is a type of fraud, but not an overt absolute, sophisticated one - more cumulative embellishment of stories, as they were retold and re-written.

Solo wrote: At any rate, the genuine Paul often made appeal to shared experiences, especially afflictions, his humiliation by God, denied a sense of shame and spoke of abnormal states of mind that he attributed to the working of the revelatory process but that we know would have been seen as mental illness (possession) by outsiders ... Paul refuses to be shamed by the external view of himself and considers the periods of incapacity or reduced capacity to be part and parcel of the "sufficient grace" he received from Christ.
It could have been any member/s of the community who wrote of
  • " ... appeal to shared experiences, especially afflictions, "his" humiliation by God, denied a sense of shame, and spoke of abnormal states of mind that "he" attributed to the working of the revelatory process"
To assert a "genuine Paul" is a reification fallacy. The mental illness thing is a proposition; it may reflect any number of things.
.
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Blood
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Re: Brodie vs Carrier on historicity of NT Paul

Post by Blood »

Solo wrote:People who are have absolute convictions of the correctness of their beliefs and preferences will not be dissuaded by logical argument. The arguments that I have seen for the fictitious character of Paul do not appreciate the myriad of difficulties with this position. While there is indeed a possibility that Jesus did not exist at all and a strong likelihood that the historical trace of him is mostly or completely a literary fiction, the case for Christians inventing Paul is hard to fathom. Who would do that and to what purpose ? Was that one person - the textual analysis of the "genuine" Paulines suggests on the whole, it was - or a team ? Who would authorize such work and how would it have gained acceptance ? Were the "inventor(s)" of Paul , proto-orthodox Christians or Marcionite docetists ? If the former, why would the nascent church insist making Paul such a difficult figure - one obviously at odds with the Jewish proto-Christian movement, and even his own "official" church biography (Acts) ? If the latter, why would Marcionites paint a "Jewish" Paul who had absolutely no knowledge of the Demiurge or insist on a material foundation of spirituality (1 Cor 15:44) ? Now even if people want to argue that parts of Paul were created by the Catholics and parts by Marcionites, it remains to be shown how the corpus (of the seven "genuine" letters) magically settled into a shape that could be used by both, the orthodox and by the heretics. Now who could possibly redact Paul that way and why ?

And this is just scratching the surface. If the Pauline corpus originated in the second century why would the seven letters have markers of the church organization and development and ideas of the parousia different than the Deuteropaulines ? The sophistication of this fraud would be mind-boggling.
The first question to ask is why are we accepting any Pauline epistles as "authentic," when it can be demonstrated that multiple authors wrote fake epistles under the name Paul, or attributed them to Paul. That alone should ring loud alarm bells that things are not what they seem.

Starting off with the unwarranted assumption that there are "authentic" Pauline epistles is the same thing as starting off with the cleansing of the temple as unquestioned historical fact.

Then we have the fictional Paul as Odysseus/Jesus in Acts.

There is this pervasive idea that ancient theologians can invent stories about Jesus or Paul, but they cannot invent Jesus or Paul. Which is illogical. The human imagination is quite capable of inventing people, prophets and gods, and the religious imagination positively requires it.

There's nothing "sophisticated" here. It's just a bunch of monks scribbling their religious fantasies on papyri.
“The only sensible response to fragmented, slowly but randomly accruing evidence is radical open-mindedness. A single, simple explanation for a historical event is generally a failure of imagination, not a triumph of induction.” William H.C. Propp
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Re: Brodie vs Carrier on historicity of NT Paul

Post by RecoveringScot »

Blood wrote:
There is this pervasive idea that ancient theologians can invent stories about Jesus or Paul, but they cannot invent Jesus or Paul. Which is illogical. The human imagination is quite capable of inventing people, prophets and gods, and the religious imagination positively requires it.

There's nothing "sophisticated" here. It's just a bunch of monks scribbling their religious fantasies on papyri.
Why would they invent Paul, and at the same time create a writer whose 'Jesus' does not match the Gospel figure, if they had become monks on account of reading the Gospels, or hearing them preached (presumably)? What was the story that made them 'monks' in the first place?
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Re: Brodie vs Carrier on historicity of NT Paul

Post by MrMacSon »

Blood wrote:There is this pervasive idea that ancient theologians can invent stories about Jesus or Paul, but they cannot invent Jesus or Paul. Which is illogical. The human imagination is quite capable of inventing people, prophets and gods, and the religious imagination positively requires it.

There's nothing "sophisticated" here. It's just a bunch of monks scribbling their religious fantasies on papyri.
RecoveringScot wrote:Why would they invent Paul, and at the same time create a writer whose 'Jesus' does not match the Gospel figure, if they had become monks on account of reading the Gospels, or hearing them preached (presumably)? What was the story that made them 'monks' in the first place?
It seem like the Pauline narrative developed separate to the gospels' narrative, in separate communities/sects/cults, and they were later conflated and redacted*. The later generations would hardly know the original sources, other than as 'apostlic' works. The Pauline texts read like other Gnostic texts. It seems likely there was a lot of conflation and elaboration.

* That is the conclusion of Dutch Radical AD Loman.
Last edited by MrMacSon on Thu Oct 23, 2014 6:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Brodie vs Carrier on historicity of NT Paul

Post by outhouse »

Blood wrote:
There's nothing "sophisticated" here. It's just a bunch of monks scribbling their religious fantasies on papyri.
Only if you wish to throw out cultural and social anthropology, and stick your head in the sand to what is really known with a high degree of plausibility.
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Re: Brodie vs Carrier on historicity of NT Paul

Post by outhouse »

Solo wrote:People who are have absolute convictions of the correctness of their beliefs and preferences will not be dissuaded by logical argument. The arguments that I have seen for the fictitious character of Paul do not appreciate the myriad of difficulties with this position. While there is indeed a possibility that Jesus did not exist at all and a strong likelihood that the historical trace of him is mostly or completely a literary fiction, the case for Christians inventing Paul is hard to fathom.
Agreed.

With a conspiracy mentality, one can deduce all evidence to the inane.


These people were not that sophisticated, and thus we have a high degree of certainty knowing their social patterns that gives these writings a backdrop to reflect upon.

What makes looking for a mythical Paul as supreme idiocy, is the lack of a replacement hypothesis for the epistles in which we see the same writing style in rhetoric and theology, that addresses a certain period in time.


It amazes me people are that bored to try and dig through ideas that have been put to the garbage heap, for a long time, what I see is ignorance the whole study overall.


Take a class pick up a book.
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