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St Paul the conman (NEW CONCEPTS)
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Grant



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THOBR is brilliant! You have restored my interest in science and history (frankly I was getting a bit tired with knowledge, too busy and stupid to read academic papers and too bored with pop science and pop history). I want to join the fun but am in awe of your correspondents. How do they know so much, or are they just bluffing?

Any way here's a contribution which might be of interest, although it's not as original as I would like.

It's pretty obvious that St Paul was a crook. The founder of the Christian religion didn't even know Jesus and he used to be a tax collector, one of the most grasping and reviled of professions in the ancient world. But after reading THOBR I realise that all the academics who write about him are guilty of careful ignoral. They ignore the evidence that he was most likely the L Ron Hubbard of his age.

First, where the hell did he go? Acts finishes with St Paul in prison but after that there is no news, just a few legends that he insisted on being tried in Rome as he was a Roman citizen and eventually died a martyr's death there. But was there really a law which said that a Roman citizen must be tried in Rome? Surely, this would be totally impracticable for the Empire to administer. And as the founder of the Church surely the early Christians would have known exactly how he died?

Second, the story of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts makes it pretty obvious what sort of scam Paul was running. You may remember that the apostles are supported by a number of followers who are exhorted to sell all their goods and give the money to Jesus. But Ananias and Sapphira keep a little of the money back. The result is that they are struck dead!

My point is that even atheistic commentators usually don't want to treat St Paul the way they would treat any modern religious leader who behaved the same way. The most likely explanation of Paul's disappearance is that the trial in Rome was a ruse, and he just ran off with the money!
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Mick Harper
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Welcome aboard, Grant. I enjoyed your post about St Paul but I disagree with the conman label. And I disagree with giving L Ron Hubbard the same label, though I agree they were in the same business. Starting world religions is just not a sufficiently paying proposition to attract conmen.

However running a world religion may very well demand doing things that simple crumbums like yourself might regard as unethical. I can say this because, in a minor way, I'm in the same business as Paulie and Ron. You may now kiss the ring.
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Hatty
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..he used to be a tax collector, one of the most grasping and reviled of professions in the ancient world.

Do you not find that the famous conversion was all the more telling because of Paul's despised profession? It could be seen as significant that he changed his name, a token of a new identity or rebirth perhaps.
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Ishmael


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Hatty wrote:
..he used to be a tax collector, one of the most grasping and reviled of professions in the ancient world.

Do you not find that the famous conversion was all the more telling because of Paul's despised profession? It could be seen as significant that he changed his name, a token of a new identity or rebirth perhaps.


Paul wasn't a tax collector.
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Rocky



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Ishmael wrote:
Paul wasn't a tax collector.

He's the patron saint of London now. Shares the post with Thomas Becket.
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Mick Harper
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You seem to be a bit of a hexpert on popery, Rocky. How are these things decided?
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Grant



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Ishmael is right. He was a tent-stitcher, not a tax collector. Sorry, sheer ignorance on my part.
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Mick Harper
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This can't be right either. He is clearly an intellectual of some sort and why would a 'tent stitcher' be a Roman citizen? The name 'tent stitcher' is clearly some kind of allusion. But to what? We are officially 'on the case'.
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Chad


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The name 'tent stitcher' is clearly some kind of allusion. But to what?

Sounds to me he was some sort of facilitator, in the employ of the Romans, to keep the local bigwigs on side. A 'tent stitcher' in the literal sense certainly wouldn't have been in any position to "violently persecute" early Christians. - - But a metaphorical tent would be a good place to conduct business.
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Mick Harper
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As in "We want him in the tent pissing out not outside the tent pissing in" (Lyndon Baines Johnson), you mean?
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Ishmael


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Mick Harper wrote:
This can't be right either. He is clearly an intellectual of some sort and why would a 'tent stitcher' be a Roman citizen? The name 'tent stitcher' is clearly some kind of allusion. But to what? We are officially 'on the case'.

According to his letters, he was a Pharisee -- part of the religious intelligentsia.

In the book of Acts, it is claimed that Paul studied under a famous "1st century" Jewish Rabbi, Gamaliel the Elder. That would mean Paul attended the elite school of his day. But I wouldn't trust Acts as an historical document whatsoever. Not even in the slightest.

(Aside: Whenever I see Gamaliel's name, I always wonder if he was some relation of this guy.)

Paul as a tent-maker came later. Though I don't know what one is supposed to do exactly with a degree in "Pharisee". Probably about as much as you do with a Philosophy degree.

According to Christian teaching, Paul refused to take charity or any payment for preaching. Instead, he works as a tent-maker, selling tents to pay for his personal upkeep. Aquilla and Priscilla, two persons he mentions in his letters, were also supposedly tent-makers.

Problem is, now I've looked into it, the only support for this seems to come from Acts -- and I think the whole of that book is utter fiction. Paul makes no statement anywhere concerning making his living this way.

If you seek an esoteric meaning for the "tent-making," look no further than Paul's own words:

For we know that if the earthly tent which is our house is torn down, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For indeed in this house we groan, longing to be clothed with our dwelling from heaven, inasmuch as we, having put it on, will not be found naked. For indeed while we are in this tent, we groan, being burdened, because we do not want to be unclothed but to be clothed, so that what is mortal will be swallowed up by life.
-- 2 Corinthians 5

The only "tent" that Paul ever refers to is the human body.

As for Roman citizenship, historians tell us that this is inherited. His father or grandfather may have been granted it. I came up with a rather masterful thesis to explain how exactly it might have happened. Very well argued and brilliant piece. Too bad I don't believe in history anymore. LOL!

Hatty. Feel free to repost that here if you remember it and can find it.
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Ishmael


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Chad wrote:
The name 'tent stitcher' is clearly some kind of allusion. But to what?

Sound to me he was some sort of facilitator, in the employ of the Romans, to keep the local bigwigs on side. A 'tent stitcher' in the literal sense certainly wouldn't have been in any position to "violently persecute" early Christians. - - But a metaphorical tent would be a good place to conduct business.

Chad. With all due respect (and we have a lot of respect for ignorance around here), you should familiarize yourself with the source material before offering an explanation for it (note that I did not suggest you familiarize yourself with the scholarship). Just get the data first hand and do your best with it.

And I warn you, our group happens to include the world's foremost authority on the Apostle Paul (though the world does not yet know it).
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Hatty
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The name 'tent stitcher' is clearly some kind of allusion. But to what?

The only "tent" that Paul ever refers to is the human body.

A tent is perhaps the landlubbers' equivalent of a boat; most of Jesus' followers were fishermen and, thanks to Wireloop, we've understood the correlation between boats and clothes as material protection/ possessions.
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Mick Harper
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I read the account of Paul's conversion in Acts and was none the wiser. However the apparent reference to it in Galatians made me twitch a little bit. It seemed to imply that Paul was on his way from Arabia to Damascus, and of course Damascus was the intellectual capital of the Arab World.

Obviously we think of all this happening later than either Paul's lifetime or when the New Testament was written, but given that we might be dealing with later interpolations, I suppose it's worth mentioning.
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Ishmael


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Acts is largely a work of fiction and whatever it says of Paul's conversion must be considered allegorical by default. But Galatians is first hand, which makes any overlap or deviation significant surely.

You may recall that I have another idea about Damascus entirely.

The word "Damascus" simply means (like Al Qaida in Arabic) "the base." We are told that Paul was headed to a "Damascus" in order to arrest the Christians there. Why in heaven's name would he leave Jerusalem, where was located James "The Brother of Jesus", the purported leader of the early church, to proceed to the backwater of Damascus Syria to arrest Christians? (I am unaware that Damascus was "the intellectual capital of the Arab World"). It makes no sense.

What makes more sense is if he left Jerusalem, already under spiritual siege from Christians, to proceed to "the base" of Christianity, in an effort to exterminate the sickness at its root. Was Christianity's "base" located in present day Damascus? Unlikely. But another locale makes an excellent fit. That location is Alexandria in Egypt, the hub both of what we know as Gnostic Christianity and of Jewish Platonism. No other place, outside Jerusalem itself, could more strongly be identified as Christianity's likely "home base."

Alexandria makes a better "Damascus" for another reason. That reason being present within the person of Paul himself. After all, why would Paul have been chosen as the one to lead this mission? Was there something special about Paul that made him especially useful for this role?

As we know from his own testimony, Paul classed himself not as a Judean (a "Jew") but as a "Hebrew," suggesting his origin lay within the wider Diaspora of "Jews" living for centuries well beyond the borders of Judea and even traditional Isr'el. Where he was from is unknown. However, Occam's Razor favours one location above all others: Alexandria.

Occam's Razor favours Alexandria because this place alone offers the most likely of all possible origins for Paul's other enigmatic characteristic: his Roman Citizenship. Though there were certainly many Jews from throughout the Empire that had earned or been awarded the Roman Citizenship, the total was few, contrasted with the number of Jewish Romans found in Alexandria. Here, entire Jewish communities of tens of thousands had been granted Roman citizenship by Julius C'esar as reward for their services in his war against Ptolemy. At no other time and nowhere else in the Empire had so many Jews been awarded the Citizenship.

For this reason, the most likely of all available explanations for Paul's Roman citizenship is his being a native of Alexandria (or specifically, his father having been a native of Alexandria).

Paul's origins in Alexandria would explain why it was Paul who was selected to lead the effort against the Christians of "Damascus."

In this light, the entire event now appears extremely important. This was no excursion to Syria with the aim of arresting a few Jewish cult-members preaching to gentiles in the north. These Syrian Christians weren't even in Isr'el, let alone Judea, let alone Jerusalem!

But change the location to Alexandria and it all makes sense. This is the religious equivalent of the Roman/Carthaginian confrontation: two rival cities battling for control over the future of an entire faith. Paul's mission is revealed as an attempt by the Jerusalem Temple priests to exert doctrinaire authority over a renegade community of Jewish thinkers/ scholars/ philosophers/ rabbis preaching "heresy" out of Alexandria. This heresy was spreading to Jerusalem, even to the point of infiltrating the Sanhedrin. To defeat it, the Pharisees elected to fight on its home turf. They sent there a trusted native of Alexandria -- a refugee from the recent African famines and a member of a powerful and respected Alexandrian family. Someone who had the local credibility to enforce the will of the central authorities.
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