Was Paul part and parcel of the “Watch and Wait” period?

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Giuseppe
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Was Paul part and parcel of the “Watch and Wait” period?

Post by Giuseppe »

I quote Salm's words from here:



“Watch and Wait”

In a previous post I termed the half-century ca. 150–ca. 200 CE as a period of flux, a time when the gospels were brand new and indecision prevailed in Catholic circles over which gospel account was true. ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ and ‘Christ’ are hardly mentioned in that half century. In the former post I discussed these lacunae with reference to Ad Autolycum, a work dating to about 185 CE. Its author, Theophilus of Antioch, knows the 4G, but (in sixty pages of Greek) he doesn’t mention Jesus a single time! He doesn’t mention the virgin birth, the ministry, the apostles, the passion, the cross, the ascension… For the Bishop of Antioch, it is as if Jesus of Nazareth did not even exist. The historian Robert Grant observed that Bishop Theophilus’ “understanding of the work of Jesus Christ can be recovered only from allusions, for like other apologists of his time he never openly speaks of him” (emphasis added). I offered an explanation for this striking silence:

When the over-the-top figure, Jesus of Nazareth, arrived like a bombshell in four great, astonishing gospels in mid-II CE, Christians everywhere were awestruck. By and large they were quiet. For several decades, Christian apologists from Spain to Mesopotamia were very careful how they handled this radical new information, this stunning new Savior of the world. They looked, watched, and listened.

Irenaeus put a stop to the indecision by (as if from on high) essentially canonizing four gospels with the assertion that “just as there can only be four winds and four corners of the earth” there can only be four gospels.

This is really, very a good optimal point.

The silence or semi-silence of the Apologists about the Gospel Jesus is really more evidence supporting mythicism than the same documents where an earthly Jesus is entirely absent.

Now the problem becomes: was Paul written during the same period called by René Salm so acutely as “Watch and Wait” ?

Or did Paul precede the same “Watch and Wait” period?
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