On Paul, specifically, the only honest stand I can take is “I wasn’t there.” Everything beyond that is speculation…
No doubt. The whole subject of history and to a large extent also archeology is just a deduction of what most probably happened. It’s not an exact science, after all. In this context even historicity of Biblical Saul can be (and by some, indeed, is) doubted. Just as a curiosity — his authentic historicity has much higher probability than that of Jesus. Still, history and archeology have quite sound methodologies to sort the historical artifacts into a coherent picture, but in essence it resembles more a work of a detective than a mathematician (by which I don’t mean that my article is a historical analysis — see below).
The way I like to approach this whole Biblical “mystery” (mostly NT, and from the OT only Torah and Daniel who is essential in understanding the imagery of Revelation) is in a nutshell like this:
We have all these documents that can be more or less dated (now I don’t mean the extrapolated date of composition but the dating of the oldest copy we know of), and these documents tell us (if nothing else) what concepts were known (and adhered to at least at the time of writing that copy, if not earlier — the dating of composition is a tricky business, but there are safe estimates that can be made) within particular schools of thought that are still present to this day.
Comparing them with similar documents and concepts from other traditions (Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, etc.) and also with what I can personally confirm, injecting a little bit of human psychology that didn’t change significantly during last few millenia, I try to get the “whole picture”. Sometimes it surprises me how it reveals and connects also things I didn’t previously consider.
So,
- the earliest witnesses to the original text of the New Testament almost all fall around 200–300 AD or later (those are the physical copies)
- copy of Gospel of Thomas found in Nag Hammadi is dated around 340 AD
- now, the “extrapolated” dates of composition are roughly as follows: authentic Pauline epistles ca 50–60 AD, Gospel of Thomas ca 40–140 AD, Gospel of Mark ca 66–70 AD, Gospel of Matthew ca 70–110 AD, Gospel of Luke ca 80–110 AD, Gospel of John ca 90–110 AD, Book of Revelation ca 95 AD
- Torah as we know it was composed around 600 BC after Babylonian exile, based on earlier written sources and oral traditions (I won’t go into more detail here, look up Israel Finkelstein, he is a fantastic source on all things pertaining to ancient Jewish history)
- Jewish God refers to himself as “I Am that I Am”, Jesus makes a reference to it in John “Before Abraham was, I am” which is an equivalent of Vedic sayings “Thou are that” and “I am Brahman” (essentially equating oneself with God, hence attempt at stoning Jesus) — when you look up proto-indo-europeans and their migration from Pontic steppe (started 4000BC) it may make a lot of sense (what Abraham allegedly brought from Ur was most probably the original non-dual philosophy/mysticism and not Zoroastrianism as it’s popularly believed)
- Gospel of Thomas could be safely a part of Buddhist lore (I’m too lazy to Google the parallels)
Essentially, what we have here are three schools of though — gnostic at one side, “Pauline” at the other, and something in between (synoptic gospels + John) still heavily leaning toward gnostic point of view and not “Pauline”. Some people hypothesize that Thomas is the proto-gospel or at least one of the original sources. Anyway, all those writings seem to come from around the same time— second half of 1st century AD.
All in all, it seems to me that Saul was more concerned with writing about theology and religion than direct knowledge and action, not to mention that if you leave his writing out, you lose nothing, but if you take him in you are in for a lot of confusion (even the elect may get confused :D).
The Last temptation of Christ
I saw only the movie when I was a teenager, but what an eye-opener it was!
Thanks for stopping by, Jack ;)
