Yes, fictional. There isn’t a single contemporary historical mention of Paul from the 1st century.
In the writing attributed to the Paul character. He admits that he never met jesus. The story goes that jesus supposedly dies before Paul assimilates into christianity.
The NT claims that Fictional Paul goes on to write 13-14 of the 27 New Testament books.
He writes 13-14 of the 27 New Testament books from “dreams and visions.”
If this isn’t bad enough, it turns out that Paul was a murdering criminal and a terrorist.
1 Corinthians 15:9-10, “For I am the least of the apostles, that am not meet to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.”
Acts 8:1-5, “And Saul was consenting unto his death. And at that time there was a great persecution against the church which was at Jerusalem; and they were all scattered abroad throughout the regions of Judaea and Samaria, except the apostles. And devout men carried Stephen to his burial, and made great lamentation over him. As for Saul, he made havock of the church, entering into every house, and haling men and women committed them to prison. Therefore they that were scattered abroad went every where preaching the word. Then Philip went down to the city of Samaria, and preached Christ unto them.”
Paul who was Saul was consenting unto the death of Stephen. which means:
Saul approved the stoning murder of Stephen. We can see that the high Priest gave him authority here:
Acts 9:1-2, “And Saul, yet breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, went unto the high priest, And desired of him letters to Damascus to the synagogues, that if he found any of this way, whether they were men or women, he might bring them bound unto Jerusalem.”
Galatians 1:13 For you have heard of my previous way of life in Judaism, how intensely I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it.
But did he kill anyone?
Saul, arrested people and brought them back to Jerusalem to be killed by stoning.
Acts 22:4. And I persecuted this way unto the death, binding and delivering into prisons both men and women.
Acts Chapter 26:10-11
[10] Which thing I also did in Jerusalem: and many of the saints did I shut up in prison, having received authority from the chief priests; and when they were put to death, I gave my voice against them.
[11] And I punished them oft in every synagogue, and compelled them to blaspheme; and being exceedingly mad against them, I persecuted them even unto strange cities.
~Articles and research:
Apollonius, Jesus and Paul: Men or Myths?
by Acharya S/D.M. Murdock ~Bible Scholar
http://www.truthbeknown.com/apollonius.html
The Evolution of the Pauline Canon
by Robert M. Price ~Bible Scholar
http://www.depts.drew.edu/jhc/RPcanon.html
Robert Price and the Letters of Paul
http://1peter315.wordpress.com/2008/06/23/robert-price-and-the-letters-of-paul/
The Fabricated Paul. Early Christianity In The Twilight - Hermann Detering
http://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B006XXX04G
St Paul the Apostle
– Could it all be a fabrication?
A Jew called Saul? An apostle called Paul? Or just plain invention? From religious policeman to grandee of the church, from beast fighter in Ephesus to beheading in Rome, Paul’s story has more holes than a swiss cheese.
Curiously, the trail-blazing Christian missionary and apostle appears nowhere in the secular histories of his age. Ironically, though supposedly in Jerusalem at the right time, he can give no witness to a historical Jesus. But was Paul himself a genuine historical figure? The Pauline journeys, including the supposed transportation of the apostle to Rome, are characterized by incongruities, contradiction, and the absurd.
A closer look at the great missionary that some say “founded Christianity”.
A Fabricated Apostle?
Two Different Pauls in Epistles and Acts – plus an Extra, Saul !
Saul of Tarsus – a witness for Jesus?
One is informed by Acts that St Paul’s early day stance was as “Saul, the Christian persecutor”. Yet if Saul really was a vigilante for orthodox Judaism at the time of Stephen’s stoning (Acts 7.58-8.3), becoming the chief persecutor of Christians, no less – one wonders just where was Saul, not long before, when a supposed radical rabbi called Jesus was stirring up whole towns and villages?
Paul’s role as religious policeman seems not to have awakened until shortly after the godman’s death. But in itself this suggests Jesus of Nazareth had no great impact. After all, Saul was a contemporary of Jesus in time and place, raised in Jerusalem (“at the feet of Gamaliel” – Acts 22.3) at precisely the time the godman was overturning moneychangers in the Temple and generally provoking Pharisees and Sadducees.
Would not Saul, a young religious hothead (“exceedingly zealous of the traditions” – Galatians 1.14) have waded into those multitudes to heckle and attack the Nazarene himself? Would he not have been an enthusiastic witness to JC’s blasphemy before the Sanhedrin? And where was Saul during “passion week”, surely in Jerusalem with the other zealots celebrating the holiest of festivals? And yet he reports not a word of the crucifixion?
Paul, another “witness for Jesus”, saw and heard nothing!
Two Pauls – One Illusion
http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/saul-paul.htm
Journeys with an Apostle – First Mission
Paul in Cyprus and Galatia
Real or Imagined?
Did Saint Paul, native of Tarsus and Roman citizen as he claimed, really make the journeys ascribed to him – or are they just a frame upon which to hang his seminal epistles? Did this erstwhile Rabbi Saul, student of Gamaliel and Pharisaic Jew, really sally forth over sea and mountain – or could the story of his travels have been concocted precisely to framework missives of orthodoxy aimed at recalcitrant synagogues of the Jewish diaspora? A century of archaeology appears to confirm a few circumstantial details mentioned in his letters and yet the biblical account gives one cause to wonder.
On the Island of Love
http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/apostle.htm
Journeys with an Apostle – First Mission
Galatians – Barbarians, Settlers or Jews?
– further adventures of the improbable Paul
Galatians, the “most authentic” of the Pauline epistles, raises more questions than it answers. If its pugnacious author was, in reality, an early Christian missionary, then the letter is perhaps the first record of his clash with competitors over a territory he had claimed for himself. But what territory?
Paul’s letter was ostensibly addressed to “the churches of Galatia” but gives no clue as to precisely where those churches were located. Speculation falls into two camps, the “north Galatian” theory, centred on the original Gallic tribes; and the “south Galatian” theory, centered on towns in Romanized Pisidia-Lycaonia recorded in Acts. Both may be wrong.
Why would “Paul” – or any other apostle from the Levant with a message for the Gentiles – eschew the more accessible, Greek-speaking coastal cities of Asia Minor for the uplands of Anatolia, populated by diverse, polyglot and warlike tribesmen? If this “frontier zone” provided credulous converts for a sharp-witted Jewish proselytizer, were these same illiterate tribesmen really the audience for an epistle of finely nuanced theology? Yet if it was to Roman colonies of the interior that Paul addressed his missive, why choose these Latin-speaking martial towns for a message of redemption and a critique of Judaism?
Something about Paul’s dealings with the Galatians in not quite kosher.
http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/galatians.html
Journeys with an Apostle – Second Mission
Philippi – The first Church in Europe or an origins myth?
It is possible that a 1st century Christian apostle called Paul sailed from the port of Troas in Asia Minor and began an evangelical crusade in Europe – but extremely improbable. Not only is the purported journey unsupported by a shred of archaeological or historical evidence but the missionary’s itinerary is a curious mix of regurgitated fable and elements cribbed from secular history. The palpable literary devices used by the author of Acts of the Apostles to “move the story on” speak volumes of the symbolic, rather than historic, nature of Paul’s journey.
Messages from the spirit world?
“And a vision appeared to Paul in the night; There stood a man of Macedonia, and prayed him, saying, ‘Come over into Macedonia, and help us.’ ”
– Acts 16.9.
http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/philippi.htm
Journeys with an Apostle – Second Mission
Corinth – Rome’s command post in Greece
But was it Paul’s?
In the New Testament yarn Paul visited Corinth on his second missionary journey, stayed eighteen months and founded the Corinthian church. He supposedly returned to Greece – one assumes to the city of Corinth – for three months on his third mission. Two letters ostensibly written to the Christians of Corinth form part of the core of “authentic” Pauline epistles and shore up the historical claims of Christianity.
In Corinth, above all places on the apostle’s various itineraries, defenders of the faith muster “historical markers” to corroborate the instructional tale of early evangelism and nascent discord in the Church of God.
Yet if we are not blinded by the conviction that the Corinthian episode is an obvious truth requiring no examination of the evidence, we can recognize the high probability that the apostle’s residence in the city is entirely a matter of fable, and that the true authorship of the Corinthian epistles is rather more problematic than is generally supposed.
http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/corinth1.html
Journeys with an Apostle – Second and Third Missions
Paul’s Magical Mystery Tours – A Greek Odyssey?
A Liar for God?
“For though I be free from all men, yet have I made myself servant unto all, that I might gain the more. And unto the Jews I became a Jew, that I might gain the Jews … To them that are without law, I became outside the law … that I might gain them outside the law … To the weak I became as weak, that I might gain the weak. I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some.”
– St Paul, 1 Corinthians 9.19,22.
According to the story in Acts, following St Paul’s successful mission to Cyprus and Lycaonia, the apostle made two extensive evangelising tours across the Greek world. The conventional dating for the journeys is sometime during the 50s or 60s of the first century, with each tour lasting two or three years. Acts records the apostle’s presence at major cities like Athens, Thessalonika and Ephesus and also at minor towns like Derbe and Mitylene unmentioned by Paul himself. Paul’s own epistles actually confirm very little of the grand tour. Curiously, Acts makes absolutely no reference to the seminal letters which, apparently, were one consequence of Paul’s magnificent missionary effort as he struggled to encourage and discipline the fledgling churches. Paul’s adventures are chock-full of miracle, magic and myth – but are they history?
Aegean Cruises
“Let us go again and visit our brethren in every city where we have preached the word of the Lord, and see how they do.”
– Acts 15.36.
http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/greek-odyssey.htm
Journeys with an Apostle – Third Mission
Paul at Ephesus – Derring-do or hocus pocus?
Acts of the Apostles, together with Eusebius’ History of the Church – the primary documents of early church history – present a fake history, crafted to tell an uplifting story of how “The Way”, a marginal sect within Judaism, became “The Church”, a universal brotherhood of Christian fellowships spread far and wide. The pivotal figure in this glorious revolution was purportedly the apostle Paul and the climax to the story has the superlative missionary raising the glorious banner of Christ in Rome itself.
Yet for all the heroics that fill the pages of the authorized story, the reports of Paul’s “evangelisation” of vast areas of the eastern Roman Empire are a triumph of brevity. This is especially true of Paul’s third missionary journey. Around a scant one hundred and thirty words are all that we have for the great mission, that and a few curious, quite surreal, tales.
The first relates to a group rebaptism.
Strange happenings in Ephesus
http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/ephesus.html
Paul in Jerusalem – An Unbelievable Yarn
Reporting Paul’s third heroic mission, Acts dismisses his evangelizing in Macedonia and Greece with barely a sentence (“he gave them much exhortation”). In contrast, Paul’s trials and tribulations in Jerusalem fill almost all of Acts 21, 22 and 23. The drama builds with a series of warnings. On landing at Tyre, brethren (“through the Spirit”) tell Paul not to go on to Jerusalem. This warning is iterated by Agabus, a Judean prophet and by the brothers gathered at the house of Philip in Caesarea. The unstoppable Paul is having none of it.
“What are you doing, weeping and breaking my heart? For I am ready not only to be imprisoned but even to die in Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus.” – Acts 21.13.
But as we shall see, try as they might, those dastardly Jews just can’t silence our superapostle. His destiny is to be a “trial” in Caesarea and an uncertain fate in Rome itself.
An Unbelievable Yarn
Paul escapes murderous Jews in Jerusalem – three times?
http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/paul-in-jerusalem.html
Journeys with an Apostle – The “Passion” of a Saint
Paul in Caesarea? – Trial and Error
Further adventures of the improbable Paul
Reality and the Christian dreamscape intersect in the city of Caesarea and in the persons of Felix and Festus, Roman procurators who feature both in secular history and in the fantasy called Acts of the Apostles. Neither the city nor the two men get a mention in Paul’s own epistles but then the apostle would recognize little of his “life” as purported in Acts.
The author of Luke-Acts – if indeed there was a single author – made extensive borrowings from the works of Josephus and the Felix/Festus episode of “Paul’s story,” told through Acts 23 to 27, owes all its “authentic history” to the Jewish historian and the writings he penned in the final decades of the first century.
Strikingly, Josephus mentions all the main characters found in this episode of Acts – Felix, Festus, Agrippa, Bernice, Drusilla, Ananias – with but one exception, the apostle Paul!
Only in the Christian dreamscape are its fabricated heroes always the centre of attention.
Caesarea grows in the story
http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/caesarea2.htm
Journeys with an Apostle – The Final Mission
The Curious Yarn of Paul’s “Shipwreck”
All at Sea!
The ripping yarn of Paul’s voyage to Rome is devoid of theology but includes several curious “miracles” and a wealth of nautical detail which is a delight to those who argue for Luke’s “accuracy as an historian.” Below the surface, however, the author of Acts has drawn on at least two, and possibly several, incompatible sources to concoct his tale of maritime adventure and evangelical pizzazz.
The climax of the fable is a shipwreck on the island of “Melite” – first associated with Malta in the 16th century by the Knights of St John, crusaders who had been kicked out of the Levant and the island of Rhodes and had established a military despotism on the tiny but strategically placed rock. Centuries earlier, an alternative – and better – claim to the holy wreck site had been made for an island off the Dalmatian coast by Benedictine monks. They drew on the work of the the 10th century Greek emperor Konstantin Porphyrogenitus, who had identified, in his book On Administering the Empire, the island of Mljet with the castaway apostle. Like Malta, in antiquity Mljet had been called Melita.
In recent times a third location has been trumpeted for the unplanned landfall, Argostoli on the island of Cephalonia, enthusiastically backed by the local clergy for obvious reasons. All three claims are attempts to imprint the Pauline fable onto real geography and real history. Yet like the multiple heads of John the Baptist, the proliferation of “evidence” merely underlines the hollowness of the supposed final voyage of the martyr-saint.
A shipwreck on Malta? Dalmatia? Cephalonia?
http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/shipwreck.html
Journeys with an Apostle – The Final Mission
Paul goes to Rome? – Theology meets Josephus!
The Book of Acts completes its wondrous tale of the apostle Paul with hearings before the Jewish multitude, the Jewish high council, Roman procurators Felix and Festus, the Jewish king Agrippa and (by tradition) the Roman emperor Nero (twice!). Acts leaves the story of its hero with the apostle resident in Rome, receiving all that came to him, and merrily preaching the kingdom of God and the Lord Jesus. Big finish, or what?
Less it appear too happy an ending, “tradition” – pious romances scribbled between the 2nd and 4th centuries such as Acts of Paul, the Apocalypse of Paul, the Martyrdom of Paul and the Acts of Paul and Thecla – provide the fabulous nonsense of his beheading by order of Nero, on the very same day as Peter! Nothing in secular history confirms the fate of St Paul – but then nothing in secular history confirms even his existence.
Voyage to Rome – or flight of fancy?
http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/road-to-rome.htm
The New Testament letters – 1
Bold, Catholic and Fake epistles! A compendium of fraud!
Many scholars attempt “chronologies” of the life of Paul, yet Acts of the Apostles is a naive fantasy and the Pauline letters of themselves provide few clues in time or place. Bringing Paul’s epistles seamlessly into the story of the church proves to be an impossible task, for collectively the letters offer no continuous narrative and no one has any real idea of the sequence of their composition. Hence the enduring “uncertainty” in the origin of the letters and their stark incompatibility with the “authorised” early history of the faith.
Pious reflection and wishful thinking assemble the epistles into the “life” of the apostle, delicately extracting a few perceived “facts” from the embarrassing mythology of Acts, as pegs on which to hang the garments. Yet the epistles are themselves full of hyperbole, the inane and the wondrous. Paul, no less than Peter, struts across a stage that exists only in the dreams of those who would speak in his name and rule with his authority. Myth is not truth.
Letters Home
http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/epistles1.htm
New Testament letters – 2
The bogus “authentic” Pauline epistles. A compendium of fraud!
The Six “Authentic” Pauline epistles?
With 15 letters demonstrably fake and with the practice of pseudepigraphy clearly at the heart of the entire corpus of the New Testament, caution is advised before accepting the remainder of the epistles as genuine.
But it is possible that half a dozen authentic letters keep company with a collection of fakes. But are they authentic?
The “Asian” letter
Galatians
“You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified.”
– Galatians 3.1.
http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/epistles2.htm
Paul – The first theologian?
The Gnostic Paul?
A Diluted Gnosticism at the heart of Orthodoxy
Did Paul ever visit Corinth? On the basis of the available evidence, that is doubtful. Paul’s supposed conversions in the Greek city are spectacular and rapid – and he even receives an encouraging visitation from the Lord himself, assuring the apostle that He already had “many people in this city” (Acts 18.9-10*). Who on earth converted them?
And yet Paul’s own converts fall away just as rapidly as they are made. Despite his unspecified “mighty deeds” and the heavenly support, Paul, the “wise masterbuilder” (1 Corinthians 3.10), has only limited success in Corinth. If we are to believe his Corinthian letters, he had a surprisingly fraught and strained relationship with “his” church. The epistles make clear that opponents and rivals had a following even within the miniscule Christian community and apparently, the “whole church” of Corinth could meet in the house of Gaius (Romans 16.23), which far from suggests serried ranks of believers.
Something is not quite right here and the existence of the Corinthian epistles – amounting to more than one-third of the entire Pauline corpus – should not blind us to an alternative, and more probable, explanation for both their origin and purpose.
A Christian Theology – from Jesus, Paul or “the Church”?
http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/corinth2.html
Paul – Too Good to be True?
The Corinthian Letters - Priestly Imperatives
Christian apologists love to condemn pagan Corinth as a city of rampant immorality. They will not be slow to tell you that the Greek verb korinthiazomai, a derivative of the city’s name, means to fornicate. But the truth is that Corinth was a bustling port with a large, transitory population. In that sense, its notoriety was no worse than any other port city.
Corinth, however, was claimed as a bridgehead for Paul. The apostle’s two seminal letters, supposedly sent to the fledgling congregation in the city, reveal a bewildering variety of opponents and present a veritable anthology of his pastoral guidance and theological diktats.
The historicity of the super-apostle, vexed by troubles on all sides, warily asserting (re-asserting?) authority over “his” church by stern letters, is not compelling. Was it Corinth that was especially in focus or “all that in every place call on the name of Jesus Christ”? (1 Corinthians 1.2). Was the author really a missionary called Paul or are the hands of later editors revealed in the odd discontinuities (six “Now concerning …” re-starts in 1 Corinthians alone)? Are we really dealing here with authentic letters from a hard-working soldier of Christ or rather, an accretion of polemical exchanges and negotiated harmonizations (Paul baptized, did not baptize and could not remember if he baptized! (1 Corinthians 1.13–17).
An inconvenient truth for those who wish to believe the holy fantasy is that NOT the “teachings of a historical Jesus” but the so-called epistles of Paul developed the dogmas and precepts of the Church. Could one man be that smart?
How many letters make two?
http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/corinth3.html
Gestation of the Faith
Paul and the Acts of the Apostles – A Ripping Yarn
One of the most startling facts of early Christianity – yet one seldom commented upon – is that complete obscurity surrounds the foundation of its churches in all of the major cities of the Roman Empire. Those very churches which would define dogma, marshall the legions of the faithful and wield state power for millennia, present the interested enquirer with a mystery: How did they begin?
Legends and “traditions” abound, of course, and apologetics is quite insistent that the “rapid growth of the church” is a primary proof and validation of the Resurrection and the claims of Christianity. But sober historical evidence is absent.
Into this void in real history leaks a wondrous tale of the pioneers of the faith, Acts of the Apostles. This fable synthesizes an idealized version of events in a world of tireless apostles and bold evangelization; of recalcitrant Jews easily neutralized; of fraternal disputes quickly resolved; of cruel persecutions met with stoicism and forbearance; of divine and angelic interventions; and of immediate, mass conversions.
Reality, however, tells a different story. Unlike in the later centuries of Christian conquest, when ambitious missionaries, backed by armies, destroyed indigenous gods and compelled the acceptance of Christ, early Christianity of necessity spread by an entirely different method. But the idea that the mechanism at work was the “bold evangelism” of a handful of charismatic apostles, armed only with the power of the Holy Spirit, is a fairy tale which should convince only the faithful.
Heroes great and small
http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/ripping-yarn.html
Journey’s End or End of the Line?
The Improbable Paul - The making of a Super Apostle!
Paul - inventor or invention?
One curiosity about Paul’s letters is that they survived at all. Polemical and often scathing in tone one wonders why the recipients kept them safe for generations, copying hostile texts not cited by the later gospel writers and neglected by the brethren at large for a century or more. Not until Marcion, the heretical bishop from Pontus, published several Pauline letters in the middle decades of the 2nd century were the epistles acknowledged or quoted.
Who, one wonders, in Paul’s faction-riven churches, decided to regard the apostle’s rambling missives as tantamount to “scripture”, on a par with the Tanakh, the only other sacred writings they might have known? Why would early Pauline converts have hung on to his letters anyway – had they not just learned from the master that the existing world would soon pass away? Who, in a time of apocalyptic anticipation, would have been so motivated (and able) to gather a collection letters purportedly sent everywhere from Rome to Galatia?
The truth is that Paul’s letters are not what they appear to be – and more to the point, not when they appear to be.
Genuine Fakes
http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/endoftheline.html
Paul and the Origins of Christianity
http://www.rejectionofpascalswager.net/paulorigin.html
THE JESUS PUZZLE
Was There No Historical Jesus? Earl Doherty
THE SOURCE OF PAUL’S GOSPEL
http://jesuspuzzle.humanists.net/supp06.htm
Does Paul Speak of Jesus as an Historical Person?
http://jesuspuzzle.humanists.net/supp08.htm
Pauline Interpolations - Richard Carrier
http://richardcarrier.blogspot.com/2011/06/pauline-interpolations.html
Richard Carrier disagrees:
The Historicity of Paul the Apostle - Richard Carrier
“So unlike Jesus, Paul has a high prior probability of existing.”
http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/7643
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