outhouse wrote:Ulan wrote:The question whether he really meant what he said is secondary to the simple acknowledgement that this is written in his letters. The point that he said this to prove his authority is a given.
That is the context, anything else is vivid dreaming. I'm not saying it does not merit study, I'm saying no study has proven anything outside imagination at this point.
Well, if everything you have is Paul's letters as we have them today and a few versions of them from other sources, it's kind of the easiest position to accept anything in those letters at face value, except in case of contradictions. The explanation that you - and most NT scholars - favor is led by the idea to keep most of the canon valid. In one way, that's prudent (you don't want to question more things than absolutely necessary), but in other ways, it may still be wrong, given the rather long time our canon needed to surface. While a reminder what the majority position on these questions is may sometimes be helpful in order to not lose it from view, it won't really help with the case when you start questioning some base assumptions in the writings.
Which brings me to this line of argumentation:
outhouse wrote:Ok so we agree it was a rhetorical statement because the man wanted to not just be a real apostle, but he was competing against sects that claimed to follow these so called real apostles.
And that is by the same words you use to say it was the only source of his Jesus knowledge.
By that same word he obviously had to know about the movement and what it was about and this sentence IN NO WAY is applied to any amount of historicity as to where he received any resurrection mythology.
It does not help in any way prove or even provide evidence that Paul originated this movement. It has been effectively refuted for a very very long time.
Let's start with the last statement: Has it been refuted? In which sense? What does "origin of the movement" actually mean in this context? Do we know whether all those "apostles" actually taught the same theology? This already assumes that all those struggles visible in Paul's letters were only about power and the significance of Mosaic Law. And even if we reduce it to the latter point, wasn't that something pretty much central to what Paul claims as his revelations?
The other point I would like you to consider is the authority question. If I remember correctly, you are proponent of the idea that the movement started somewhere or even at different locations in the diaspora, which leaves the Jerusalem community mostly as fiction. However, this torpedoes somewhat the point that a Jerusalem community with the family of Jesus at its center was the actual origin of most of Paul's teachings. You cannot sink this part of the story and still claim the authority question as decided.
And if you sink this, we are back to square one. If this part is false, what else is?
