Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] How important actually was Paul when Alive and after by Bart Ehrman?
[00:00:09] How influential actually was Paul in his day and how much of what we read about him and allegedly by him in the New Testament is accurate and how much is slanted in one way or the other? Indeed. How about later times? How was he remembered and indeed misremembered?
[00:00:27] Just now I'm in the process of preparing the third edition of my college textbook on the entire Bible, Genesis to Revelation, including the Old Testament Apocrypha.
[00:00:36] I've asked Joel Baden of Yale University to co edit it with me. He's taken care of the Hebrew Bible parts and I've got the New Testament.
[00:00:45] That means I need to read through the whole thing again, of course, and frankly, it's not generally exciting reading your own prose from some years ago, but pleasure does come from reading bits that you think are especially interesting. And I had that experience this morning and I thought I could share it with all of you here on the blog.
[00:01:03] It's part of the introduction to chapter 24 on the book of Acts, and it deals with the portrayal, understanding and significance of Paul both in and after the New Testament. So here's what I say there, and the reference is the Bible Historical and Literary Introduction, published by Oxford University Press.
[00:01:21] Here goes One could argue that Paul was even more important after his lifetime than during it.
[00:01:29] Many people think of Paul as the most significant figure in early Christianity outside of Jesus, and rightly so, for reasons that we've seen. But there are some indications that at the time he was living in, say, the 50s of the common Era, Paul was not as central as he became later.
[00:01:45] For one thing, it's worth noting that in just about all of the churches that Paul established, he had opponents whose views differed radically from his and whom he saw as endangering his mission and message.
[00:01:58] These people must have been a threat, and there seems to have been so many of them.
[00:02:03] That would suggest that in his own day, Paul was one voice among many.
[00:02:08] His was the voice that won out. But that may not have been the obvious outcome at the time.
[00:02:13] Moreover, these opponents of Paul were not all advocating the same views. His opponents in Galatia, for example, maintained that true followers of Jesus needed to accept circumcision and keep the Jewish law. Paul replied hot with anger. His opponents in Corinth, on the other hand, maintained that they were already leading a resurrected existence and they were enjoying the full benefits of salvation. And Paul thought that this too was utterly wrong.
[00:02:39] It's interesting that some of the people in Corinth who bought into this aberrant message belong to the faction that claimed Paul as their hero and leader. See First Corinthians 1:12.
[00:02:51] And so there are two major points to make. In his own day, Paul was not universally regarded as the ultimate apostolic authority whose views alone could be accepted as true.
[00:03:01] And even those who did appeal to his authority advocated views at times that he found objectionable.
[00:03:09] None of that changes in the decades after Paul's death.
[00:03:13] By the second century, there are some groups of Christians who consider Paul the arch enemy.
[00:03:19] These are the spiritual descendants of Paul's opponents in Galatia, Jewish Christians who continue to think that to follow Jesus means adhering to the Jewish law.
[00:03:29] From this perspective, Paul, who stressed justification by faith apart from the law, got it precisely wrong.
[00:03:37] Other Christian groups revered Paul but despised each other, each group claiming that it had the true interpretation of Paul.
[00:03:44] And so, for example, some groups of Gnostics insisted that Paul advocated their point of view. Other Christians from the orthodox tradition insisted that no Paul supported their point of view. And so it went.
[00:04:00] Each of these various groups produced writings that attested their various theological perspectives, produced by authors claiming to be Paul. And so, for example, we know of forgeries in Paul's name from the second century, such as Third Corinthians, a book that vehemently attacks the Gnostic claim that believers need to escape their flesh to have salvation. See box 25.1.
[00:04:23] We also have a letter that Paul allegedly sent to the church in laodicea see Colossians 4:16, and a set of 14 letters that supposedly went back and forth between Paul and the greatest philosopher of his day, Seneca.
[00:04:38] All of these books were forged in the name of Paul. None of them appears to represent the views of the historical Paul.
[00:04:46] We also have accounts of Paul's life from later sources, including one book from the second century that's called the act of Paul.
[00:04:55] This narrative is filled with terrific but highly legendary accounts of Paul.
[00:04:59] In one of the most famous portions of the book, Paul converts a wealthy, aristocratic young woman named Thecla, who overhears a sermon that Paul delivers next door.
[00:05:09] But this sermon is unlike anything you'll find from Paul's pen in the New Testament.
[00:05:15] In it, Paul claims that the way to have eternal life is to practice sexual renunciation, even if you are married. See box 23.3 here. It's not faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus that matters, but a person's ongoing virginity.
[00:05:31] Thecla finds this message compelling and converts to be a follower of Paul and through him, a follower of Jesus.
[00:05:37] Much to the consternation of her family, and especially her fiance, she unceremoniously calls off the wedding so that she can lead a life of abstinence.
[00:05:47] This decision leads to a range of very interesting stories, as Thecla is denounced and condemned to death on a couple of occasions for violating all the acceptable norms of her society, only to be saved miraculously by divine interventions time and again in another story, in the act of Paul, the Apostle is condemned to execution and is taken into the arena to fight the wild beasts.
[00:06:13] A particularly fearsome lion is sent in to maul him. But as it turns out, the animal and the apostle knew each other. It's a talking lion whom Paul had earlier met in the wilderness and who had asked to be baptized.
[00:06:26] Paul graciously complied. They both were eventually separated and captured, only to meet up here in these very different circumstances. And the lion asks Paul, paul, is that you?
[00:06:36] Paul replies, oh, are you the lion I baptized? Will wonders never cease? They both miraculously escape the arena and they go their merry ways.
[00:06:46] None of these stories, well, I mean, obviously has any historical basis.
[00:06:52] Still, they are valuable for showing how Paul came to be understood and portrayed in later times.
[00:06:58] One does not need to wait until the second century to see Paul represented in ways that differ from his own self representation in the seven or eight undisputed Pauline epistles.
[00:07:07] One can already see this in the writings of the New Testament, especially in the Acts of the Apostles and the Deutero Pauline epistles and in the rest of the chapter. I will go on to explain what happens not just with Paul in Acts, and in the next chapter I discuss the six Deutero Paulines.
