I refer to the academic article mentioned also by Richard Carrier in the his book (at the moment I have not the book ready to hand). At any rate, given the fact that in the second visit to Jerusalem, Paul sees the three Pillars in the same room, then it is more probable than not that also in the first visit he met Paul and James in the same room.Paul the Uncertain wrote: ↑Thu Feb 07, 2019 2:38 pm
I looked at the Greek quickly online. I don't see anything at 1:18-19 that places Paul, Peter and James in the same room at the same time. Perhaps you could point it out to me, so it can be clear to me, too, as clear as it would need to be for Paul's audience to understand Mere James' role.
No, no, I am saying that there were two ways a not-Christian (a Pagan or a Jew like the pre-christian Paul) could heard about the Christian message:https://biblehub.com/interlinear/galatians/1.htm
I'm unsure that I'm parsing your first sentence correctly. Paul's claim does imply that he didn't get it from a pagan, but would anybody accuse him of getting it from a pagan? Nothing on the page suggests that Paul was rebutting that kind of accusation.According to your objection, any Pagan who met a mere Christian could show himself as an Apostle. By doing simply "copy and paste". I don't think so.
1) from a mere brother
2) or, from an apostle.
In the first case, the knowledge derived by the our not-Christian outsider has to be more little than the knowledge derived in the second case. In the second case, he would have known surely a lot of things about how the sect worked.
Well, I context with strong personal certainty that your “sure”. If the knowledge about Christ derived from a mere brother was so useful, then not only Paul, but any not-Christian would have made what Peregrinus Proteus did later: to usurp for himself the title of Apostle (or prominent Christian), by doing simply “copy and paste” from the hearsay by the first mere Christian idiot.Would anybody accuse Paul of getting it from a fellow Jewish Christian, somebody who could easily have heard several Jerusalem apostles preach? Sure. Even assuming brother of the Lord in that context says no more than that, "no more than that" doesn't exclude being able to come up with or recall sermon topics.
In the my metaphor of the presumed pedophile, the pedophile can't be accused so easily of the his presumed vice if he claims that he has met a child in company of an adult. In the same way, Paul can't be accused of “copy and paste” of the Gospel worthy of an Apostle, if the only Apostle met by him is Peter in company of a mere brother.
Any argument derived from the legend of Paul persecutor is not worhty of the my attention. I am sorry. Pliny and Tacitus (both anti-Christian persecutors) derived from mere Christians their Gospel, but they didn't usurp the title of Apostle for themselves. The gnosis of an Apostle does the real difference. Paul is accused of copy and paste from a previous Apostle, not from a mere Christian.Paul writes that he'd been far away from Jerusalem for years, and he apparently had had only hostile contact with the Jerusalem church before then. Any typical Jerusalem Jewish Christian could easily know more about the ideas circulating among the Jerusalem based apostles than Paul did at the time of his first meeting with Peter.
From what a mere brother knew - Christ crucified and risen, period - it is not possible to usurp the title of Apostle for themselves. The Apostles knew things not known by the mere brothers. Paul reveals what he says in 1 Cor 2:6-11 only to Perfects.This hypothetical Mere James doesn't have to understand what the apostles preach as well as an apostle would, he just has to know what the different Jerusalem apostles preach.
Did he derive that particular gnosis from a previous apostle or from Christ himself?
Who was not-perfect didn't know that gnosis.
if Paul could, why couldn't another not-Christian, too? You ignore the exact difference between what a “Perfect” knew and what a mere brother knew.Paul is a sophisticated religious thinker. If Mere James hummed a few bars of any melody Paul enjoyed, then Paul could plausibly fill in the orchestration.
your entire argument collapses since a mere brother didn't know what “only the Perfects among you” could know. The question for the Galatians was: how could Paul know the gnosis reserved to only the Perfects? The mere knowledge of a “crucified Christ” can't make you an Apostle, despite of all my candor. Not even Richard Carrier can show himself as an Apostle, in the my eyes.Paul needs to eliminate, at a minimum, everybody he mentions from the set of his possible informants about any Jerusalem apostolic teachings congruent with what became his gospel. He doesn't do that with James. James cannot help Paul as a potential witness if Paul doesn't, at a minimum, establish what James would testify and why James is qualified to give that testimony. Paul doesn't do that with James, either.
I like a lot your profession of Jesus agnosticism, but this discussion has made me more sure about the force of the Carrier's argument.This would be a good time to say that I'm not an adherent of the polar opposite view, that brother of the Lord ought to be read at face value, as some apologists happily do, that Paul says he met a kinsman of Jesus. There are a lot of possible interpetations between "any old Christian" and "another of Mary's boys." Maybe they each have their plusses and minuses.
If Paul had known only a mere brother, would have he seen him posing as an Apostle? He could. Would have he derived from him how an Apostle works? He could. What he couldn't derive in anyway from a mere brother, was the secret gnosis of the Apostles.