psychoslice
Veteran Member
I don't think there was such thing as Christianity as we know it today in Paul's time ?.
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Who taught Christianity to Paul?
- Thread starter Shia Islam
- Start date
True enough, Christianity in Paul's time appears to have been a tough sell.
psychoslice
Veteran Member
Yes, and I personally don't think many really understood what he was all about.
Totally agree. Paul's concept of reality was out of this world and it's difficult to know what he was on about.
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"it is precisely at this period, in the years 184, 180-79 and 153 BC, that we hear of a number of cases of Roman magistrates and pro-magistrates ordering mass executions both in the immediate vicinity of Rome and further afield in Italy of persons accused of using venificia [Latin for malign magic or witchcraft] (cf. Polybius 6.13.4 with Walbank ad loc.). In one case, some 2,000 persons were executed (Livy 39.41.5); in another, 3,000 (40.23.2f.). The scale of these investigations and condemnations, which easily outstr4ips any known from the late mediaeval and early modern periods in Europe, and was made possible by the effectively unlimited police power of Roman magistrates"
Gordon, R. (1999). Imagining Greek and Roman Magic. in B. Ankarloo & S. Clark Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: Ancient Greece and Rome, 159-275. University of Pennsylvania Press.
"The category of behaviour which is known in English as 'witchcraft' was therefore both unknown and meaningless in Egyptian culture. This is in sharp contrast to the situation in ancient Greece, where attempts to use magic against other humans were illegal, and even more to that at Rome, where two sets of mass trials in the early second century BCE resulted in the execution of 2000 and 3000 people respectively for the alleged crime of attempting to kill by uncanny means. These are body-counts surpassing anything achieved in the Christian witch-hunts of early modern Europe."
Hutton, R. (2006). Witches, Druids and King Arthur. Continuum International Publishing Group.
The first citation is from a paper in an edited volume (i.e., academic volume that, like peer-reviewed journals, is put together by an editorial board and consists of scholarly papers by specialists for specialists) in the series Witchcraft and Magic in Europe. These volumes (which are broken down by time-period, starting from the ancient Near East and ending with the modern era) were so important and so valuable for the ways in which they contributed to the study of witchcraft and magic that an additional volume was published: Witchcraft and Magic in Contemporary North America. The second is from Professor Ronald Hutton, who is the world's leading authority on British paganism and the history of Wicca.
He was also "brought up pagan". I mention this only because I have found that academics tend to be accused of bias when it comes to Christianity.
In one of the most important works on the history of British paganism, which runs from pre-history to the modern era, Hutton describes the social, cultural, and political dynamics resulting from the rise and dominance of Christianity. One of the issues addressed concerns witchcraft:
"did the Church enforce a narrowing of intellectual horizons? The answer, from a subjective modern standpoint, must be that it did, because of its insistence that there was only one religious doctrine as well as only one deity...Moreover, the insistence upon a single omnipotent god made belief in the power of magic a heresy in itself...The pagan Romans, like most ancient peoples and modern tribal societies, prescribed the death penalty for those who killed or who harmed property by witchcraft...It was the the pagan writer Lucan who produced the enduring European literary stereotype of the destructive witch as an ugly old woman But the first Christians went much further...The pagan Roman world could not condemn heresy, nor produce witch-hunts: Christian Europe did both, on a huge scale.
Yet, again, qualification and additions have to be made to these statements. The pagan Roman Empire, as mentioned earlier, executed hundreds of Christians for refusing to endorse the validity of its system of religion. There is no doubt from the sources that it did so in appalling ways, including burning alive, drowning and throwing them to hungry beasts; young girls were sent to brothels...By contrast, once in power the Christians tended to attack deities but spare humans: they destroyed images and wrecked holy places while leaving worshippers alone. There is no recorded case of an execution of a person for following the older religions in the first two centuries of the Christian Roman Empire.... Nor were heretics put to death, for the citorious sections of the early Church were only concerned to deprive them of places of worship, not of life. The exception was Priscillian...After him there were no more executions for unorthodox Christian doctrines in western Europe until the eleventh century....Indeed, in those parts of western Europe which were the home of, or taken over by , Germanic tribes, it seems that the Church ended a tradition of hunting and killing witches"
Hutton, R. (1991). The pagan religions of the ancient British Isles: their nature and legacy Oxford: Blackwell.
The following is from an essay I wrote before college (actually, a central reason I went was because I couldn't teach myself Greek as I had Latin, thanks to the alphabet, and I needed to learn it to further my study of paganism) which was kindly hosted on another's site:
"Although the Codex Theodosian was a political document of the state, the Church also took a strong stance against witchcraft. These theological perspectives on witchcraft are represented both in various rulings of numerous Church councils (e.g., Elvira, Laodicaea, Carthage, etc) as well as important Church fathers and theologians. Augustine’s City of God was particularly influential in defining and condemning witchcraft. He was the most responsible for the policy of viewing witchcraft as both false and yet dangerous. To Augustine, and subsequently to the Church, witchcraft was a deceit of the devil and of demons. It was a superstition (superstitio), a pagan practice, and not real. Two difficulties which were to emerge from this stance were (i) the “common people” continued to believe in the power and harm of the witch, and (ii) laws concerning witchcraft seemed to fluctuate between condemning the practice itself and condemning those who condemned witches.
Germanic law by and large emerged as an echo of Roman law, at least with respect to witches[/QUOTE]
Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion: Problems with Terminology
As ancient Greek and Latin was only a secondary major (I had intended to be a clinical psychologist), and as I ended up going onto to grad school for neuroscience and onto research in cognitive neuroscience and complex systems I do not have published work on history (with one exception that isn't relevant here). However, a paper I wrote on witchcraft in ancient Greece, as it was for a scholarship, is available online through participating universities (although I have found it elsewhere).
I may have ended up in science and mathematics, but I began with history (in particular that of paganism and neo-paganism) and I do still keep up on classical and historical scholarship. I have even continued to learn (rather than simply study from a cognitive linguistic and neurolinguistic perspective) ancient languages to read primary sources. Call it arrogant, pretentious, and narrow-minded, but knowing of what I speak and being silent if I do not is extremely important to me, rivaled only by how highly I hold academic integrity to be.
For this reason, being accused of "spin" without even so much as a reference is particularly offensive. However, as I offered no sources for what I said, rather than make the mistake I do too often (punctuating a response with unwarranted and unjustifiable insults), I have tried simply to give some sense of where I am coming from as well as some references for what I said. If these references are not enough to convince, I will happily provide as many as you wish (within reason- I only have a few hundred volumes/monographs and, while obviously I have many times that number of sources from journals, I like to make available sources themselves, not quotes,and alas most journal articles are freely accessible and of those that are many are overly technical).
I would ask, though, that you substantiate any further claims you make with respect to the accuracy of my own. I can be wrong like everybody else, but I would appreciate that I be shown to be wrong when I make claim of an academic nature.
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Perhaps I was not clear (or I have misunderstood you). We have plenty of very clear historical evidence for the assertion I made. For example, in one of the quotations I included in my last post are references to Livy. Livy was not influenced by Christianity and his descriptions of the Roman mass executions of "witches" was not either. What I asserted was not that we lack sources or that we modern historians are biased but that we have very clear evidence that the persecution of witches began before Jesus was born, that the execution of witches was ended for centuries thanks to Christianity and began far before Christianity (of course, the ways in which the Church ended the execution of witches didn't just fail to last but became integral to the European witch-trials.)
1) Doherty himself told me he was wrong here.
2) His book, The Jesus Puzzle was augmented by his next, and he still gets it wrong. "First of all, there is not much opportunity in evidence for Paul to have acquired such details about Jesus' life, for in Galatians 1 and 2 he tells us that over the course of the 17 years following his conversion, he bothered to go up to Jerusalem exactly once, for a two-week visit." How does Doherty get this number? By adding 3 (the number of years Paul states after which he went to Jerusalem) to 14 (the number of years Paul states elapsed between the first and the 2nd visit). In other word, Doherty is such a ******* moron he is incapable of reading the line in Gal. 1:18 and connecting it with Gal. 2:1 a few lines later to realize that the numbers he added to get 17 specifically state that there were 2 visits. In case this isn't clear, the only way to get the number 17 is by adding the number Paul uses to describe his first visit to the number he uses to describe his second.. If you would like to defend Doherty for being such a moron he can't even add without forgetting what he is adding, at least do so in ways consistent with his blatant inaccuracies.
Assuming that is true just means that Doherty is still wrong (and that basic arithmetic is difficult for him), "for in Galatians 1 and 2 he tells us that over the course of the 17 years following his conversion, he bothered to go up to Jerusalem exactly once". As Galatians 1 describes one visit, and 2 another, and as these visits happened in the years Doherty describes, it means that even though he paid to republish is book again he still can't add.
He didn't. He describes his experience with Jesus as
1) Occurring after Jesus died
2) Not as meeting but as ὤφθη (appearing or having seen, not having encountered/met)
It was not until 17 years before Paul went for a second time after his conversion, so it isn't wrong to say he went to Jerusalem exactly once in the meantime. It's not the way I would choose to word it but then again if one was to announce that a certain player scored only one goal in 17 games we can assume he scored at least twice in the last 18 games. In any event it's true that Paul gives no indication of learning anything from the Jerusalem group.
Then why not leave it at that? Do you believe that calling people morons makes you appear smart?
He saw him and Jesus spoke to him and gave him instructions what to do.
If that doesnt qualify as having met someone what does
Quirkybird
Member
He couldn't have seen him, Jesus was dead!
watch out that your not eternally "dead wrong"
Despite the fact that this isn't true, it is luckily completely irrelevant. How utterly obvious Doherty's stupendous idiocy here is can be derived merely by the fact that he uses "exactly once" to describe Paul's visits in Galatian's 1 & 2 (in which 2 visits are mentioned). However, in case it is difficult to understand Doherty's apparent incapacity to either read or add (given that he repeated the same mistake in his revised book), why not stop misrepresenting his incapacity to read English or use arithmetic by mischaracterizing what he says?
He does not say that Paul "went to Jerusalem exactly once" in some "meantime". He specifically states Paul "tells us" that "in Galatians 1 and 2" Paul "bothered to go up to Jerusalem exactly once". There is no point in mentioning Galatians 2 unless, like Doherty, one is so pathetically incompetent that one fails to realize Galatians 2 describes a 2nd trip, and so there is no possible way that Paul could tell us anything in Galatians 2 that means Paul visited Jerusalem "exactly once".
This is basic reading comprehension I would expect the lower tier high school students in SAT classes I taught on the side to understand perfectly. That Doherty failed to get it when he published his first book could be error, were it not for the fact that his complete and utter pathetically incompetence seems to have compelled him to pay to publish yet another book in which the same glaringly obvious mistake is repeated.
Second, after failing (over the course of two publications, the second adding hundreds of pages to the first) to realize that he derived 17 from Paul's 2 visits, he goes on to say that "in Galatians 1 and 2" Paul "tells us that over the course of the 17 years following his conversion, he bothered to go up to Jerusalem exactly once, for a two-week visit". However, that 2-week visit is in Galatians 1, and it is in Galatians 2 and 14 years later that Paul tells us of his 2nd trip (which isn't "a two-week visit"). How can Galatians 2 tell us about a "two-week visit"? Because Doherty is so inept he pays to publish this.
You can defend the fact that Doherty is so incompetent he can't even read or perhaps is incapable of elementary arithmetic (or both) and to such extent he actually paid to show this all you want. However, when Doherty says that 2 chapters in Galatians describe one trip that can only be the trip in Galatians 1, this just reflects poorly on you. And I am quite sure you are not Doherty (i.e., so stupid that you pay to display your own incompetence).
that "over the course of 17 games" he only scored one goal. Nice try.
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Quirkybird
Member
outhouse
Atheistically
Only Acts state this.
Paul himself does not tell us he ever met Jesus dead or not, you would think if Paul had actually met Jesus he would go on and on and on about it himself.
Yes, he claims to have; 1 Corinthians 9:1 Am I not free? Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord? Are you not the result of my work in the Lord?