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.
.