![](\"https:\/\/www.datingthenewtestament.com\/apostle%20paul.jpg\")
<\/a><\/div>\nLet me share\u00a0a few\u00a0thoughts about Paul, inspired by seeing the way mythicists appeal to him, usually reading Paul in a manner that may have seemed plausible in the 19th century but does not to most scholars in the 21st, who have\u00a0a much better\u00a0understanding of first-century Judaism and realize that Paul actually makes more sense in that context and against that background.<\/p>\n
It was once common to treat Paul either as the inventor of Christianity (for all intents and purposes), or at very least the person responsible for transforming it from a Jewish Messianic movement into a Hellenistic cult.<\/p>\n
Often accompanying this is the assumption that Paul had no contact with or direct knowledge of the historical figure of Jesus.<\/p>\n
It is worth pointing out, however, that that is an argument from silence. What we know about Paul is that he opposed<\/em> the Christian movement. We don\u2019t know how early he began to do so, nor precisely where, from Paul\u2019s own writings. But we do know that Paul had knowledge of the Christian movement prior to becoming a Christian himself. Not only did he persecute it, which requires awareness, but he mentions relatives who were Christians before he was<\/a>. <\/p>\n There\u2019s a Romanian pastor, Iosif \u0162on, who (if I remember correctly) was a skeptic before he became a Christian, and wrote a book during that period\u00a0with\u00a0a title something like \u201cJesus the Charlatan.\u201d It is not a subject that he brings up often in his writings and sermons these days.\u00a0It seems\u00a0that Paul too had a negative view of Christianity from\u00a0his very earliest encounter with it, and it is not impossible that Paul had some encounter with the emerging movement, or at least awareness of it, during the pre-crucifixion period. Would Paul not have been reticent to talk about his encounters with Christianity prior to his becoming a Christian himself, presumably due to embarrassment about his opposition to it? He could not pretend it didn\u2019t happen, but he certainly would not want to dwell on it, and that in fact is what we get in his letters. <\/p>\n Approached from this perspective, might not this give us a way of making sense of Paul\u2019s famous statement<\/a>, the subject of so much discussion<\/a>, speculation and unpersuasive interpretation, \u03b5\u1f30 \u03ba\u03b1\u1f76 \u1f10\u03b3\u03bd\u03ce\u03ba\u03b1\u03bc\u03b5\u03bd \u03ba\u03b1\u03c4\u1f70 \u03c3\u03ac\u03c1\u03ba\u03b1 \u03a7\u03c1\u03b9\u03c3\u03c4\u03cc\u03bd, \u1f00\u03bb\u03bb\u1f70 \u03bd\u1fe6\u03bd \u03bf\u1f50\u03ba\u03ad\u03c4\u03b9 \u03b3\u03b9\u03bd\u03ce\u03c3\u03ba\u03bf\u03bc\u03b5\u03bd (\u201cEven if we have known Jesus according to the flesh, but now we know no longer\u201d\u00a02 Corinthians 5:16<\/a>)? Paul had in some sense known<\/em> Jesus according to the flesh, whether in terms of direct experience of\u00a0a human life\u00a0that seemed unimpressive and un-messianic to Paul, or in terms of Paul viewing him \u201caccording to the flesh\u201d in the sense of evaluating Jesus from a stance that Paul later came to view as misled by his \u201csinful nature.\u201d <\/p>\n And so another point that makes mythicism problematic is that it assumes that we know Paul did not\u00a0encounter Jesus (in a non-spiritual\/psychological sense) nor know about his activities even if never actually meeting him. That is not at all certain. What we do know is that Paul persecuted the church, had relatives who were Christians before he was, and was as well poised to hear about Jesus and the early Christian movement as early as anyone in Jerusalem \u2013 and if Paul distances himself from the Jerusalem apostles in Galatians for polemical reasons, elsewhere Paul associates the start of his missionary activity with Jerusalem (Romans 15:19<\/a>). Paul tells us absolutely nothing about his opposition to Christianity apart from the mere fact of it. <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/eardstapa.files.wordpress.com\/2010\/03\/paul-the-apostle-batoni-2.jpg\")
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