Apostle Paul (who of course wasn't actually one of the twelve
apostle=
s, he
no more knew J.C. than I knew MM)
please explain,
I will say in advance that I may be sorry that I ever asked!
The Bible doesn't record a meeting between them.
Not even in the books that were excluded form'the official version? "
Frank Zindler, a scholar accepted by liberals and Dr. Revilo P. Oliver
alike, says:
Saint Saul And His Letters
Having eliminated the OT and the gospels from the list of possible
biblical "evidences" of the existence of Jesus, we are left with the
so-called epistles.
At first blush, we might think that these epistles - some of which are by
far the oldest parts of the NT, having been composed at least 30 years
before the oldest gospel - would provide us with the most reliable
information on Jesus. Well, so much for blushes. The oldest letters are
the letters of St. Saul - the man who, after losing his mind, changed his
name to Paul. Before going into details, we must point out right away,
before we forget, that St. Saul's testimony can be ignored quite safely,
if what he tells us is true, namely, that he never met Jesus "in the
flesh," but rather saw him only in a vision he had during what appears to
have been an epileptic seizure. No court of law would accept visions as
evidence, and neither should we.
The reader might object that even if Saul only had hearsay evidence, some
of it might be true. Some of it might tell us some facts about Jesus.
Well, allright. Let's look at the evidence.
According to tradition, 13 of the letters in the NT are the work of St.
Saul. Unfortunately, Bible scholars and computer experts have gone to work
on these letters, and it turns out that only four can be shown to be
substantially by the same author, putatively Saul. g These are the letters
known as Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and Galatians. To these probably we
may add the brief note to Philemon, a slave-owner, Philippians, and 1
Thessalonians. The rest of the so-called Pauline epistles can be shown to
have been written by other and later authors, so we can throw them out
right now and not worry about them.
Saul tells us in 2 Corinthians 11:32 that King Aretas of the Nabateans
tried to have him arrested because of his Christian agitation. Since
Aretas is known to have died in the year 40 CE, this means that Saul
became a Christian before that date. So what do we find out about Jesus
from a man who had become a Christian less than ten years after the
alleged crucifixion? Precious little!
Once again, G.A. Wells, in his book The Historical Evidence for Jesus [pp.
22-23], sums things up so succinctly, that I quote him verbatim:
The...Pauline letters...are so completely silent concerning the events
that were later recorded in the gospels as to suggest that these events
were not known to Paul, who, however, could not have been ignorant of them
if they had really occurred.
These letters have no allusion to the parents of Jesus, let alone to
the virgin birth. They never refer to a place of birth (for example, by
calling him 'of Nazareth'). They give no indication of the time or place
of his earthly existence. They do not refer to his trial before a Roman
official, nor to Jerusalem as the place of execution. They mention neither
John the Baptist, nor Judas, nor Peter's denial of his master. (They do, of
course, mention Peter, but do not imply that he, any more than Paul
himself, had known Jesus while he had been alive.)
These letters also fail to mention any miracles Jesus is supposed to
have worked, a particularly striking omission, since, according to the
gospels, he worked so many...
Another striking feature of Paul's letters is that one could never
gather from them that Jesus had been an ethical teacher... on only one
occasion does he appeal to the authority of Jesus to support an ethical
teaching which the gospels also represent Jesus as having delivered.
It turns out that Saul's appeal to the authority of Jesus involves
precisely the same error we found in the gospel of Mark. In 1 Cor. 7:10,
Saul says that "not I but the Lord, [say] that the wife should not
separate from the husband." That is, a wife should not seek divorce. If
Jesus had actually said what Saul implies, and what Mark 10:12 claims he
said, his audience would have thought he was nuts - as the Bhagwan says -
or perhaps had suffered a blow to the head. So much for the testimony of
Saul. His Jesus is nothing more than the thinnest hearsay, a legendary
creature which was crucified as a sacrifice, a creature almost totally
lacking a biography."
http://www.atheists.org/christianity/didjesusexist.html
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