You wrote: No I haven't. Anything different about it?
Yes!
If the New Testament included only the Gospels.....
by Spectrum 32 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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garybuss
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Leolaia
what actual evidence is there that any "christians" predated Paul.... they were not called christians until AFTER Paul in "Antioch" by the bibles own accounts and Antioch was a center of Pauls missions. prior there were lots of Jewish apocolyptic sects, but no christians.
Rather than getting hung up on whether they called themselves "Christians" or not, it is more useful to talk about whether there was a movement centered around Jesus that predated Paul. Paul himself indicates this in Galatians 1, and the list of resurrection appearances in 1 Corinthians 15 (whether genuinely Pauline, or post-Pauline, or pre-Pauline; there is much disagreement about this passage) also portrays Paul as a Johnny-come-lately. There were many Jewish sects in the first century and Christianity started out as one of them...or more probably, as a movement out of several of them (hence, the early diversity of Christianity), but it was ab ovo a Jewish movement centered around Jesus, just as Enochic Judaism was centered around revelation from Enoch, Pharisee Judaism was centered around revelation from Moses, etc.
I agree with Narkissos' assessment of the conflicting historical evidence.....the picture gets even more complicated when one draws in the Pseudo-Clementines, Hegesippus, Papias, and other traditions such as found in Eusebius and the Apostolic Constitutions.
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Narkissos
Spectrum,
Do top catholic and orthodox clergy share the same views you have expressed in this thread? Or do they really believe the whole NT is a seamless truthful naration of Christ and his message?
I think the biggest churches, especially the Roman Catholic, have developed a remarkable ability to handle different levels of speech simultaneously in modern times. At the dogmatic level, nothing seems to be changed and the candid reader of the pontifical encyclicals may well believe that his/her childhood's catechism is still accepted as history. At the same time, Catholic Bible scholars (many of which can be qualified as "top clergy") have a full share in the field of critical studies. If you read carefully the introductions and footnotes of the Catholic Jerusalem Bible, for instance, you will notice that, beneath the superficial "pastoral speech," the writers are fully aware that most NT apparently "historical" texts (Gospels and Acts) are anything but history.
As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the turning point was the 1943 Divino Afflante Spiritu encyclical. Down to that point Catholic scholarship had consistently dismissed Bible criticism as "modernism," leaving that field to liberal Protestants (and a few Catholic "apostates," such as Renan). In the last 63 years Catholic scholarship made up for lost time and now you can hardly distinguish critical scholars by their confession.
Zen,
As Leolaia pointed out I didn't use the term "Christian" very strictly. What seems obvious to me from rhetorical analysis of the Pauline epistles is that Paul's main agenda was to manipulate at least two distinct existing movements into some sort of mutual acknowledgement: (1) the Hellenistic Christ-cults, made up of diaspora Jews and Gentiles on the fringe of Judaism, and (2) the Judean group of James which was exclusively Jewish (ethnically), Palestinian (geographically), and centered on the Temple and the Torah. The label "Christian" probably suits the former better than the latter -- whether (and how) those were previously related is a big question imo. Still, Paul invented neither of them. And he definitely failed to make the two into one: from the Gospel of Matthew to the pseudo-Clementines it is clear that most "Jewish Christians" kept on considering him as a false apostle. Otoh, the post-Pauline Hellenistic churches eventually developed into the "Great Church" (or "catholic Church") and dismissed the so-called "Judeo-Christians" (Nazorenes, Ebionites) as heretical.