Casting doubt on the claims made in Acts that Paul, assuming he existed at all, visited Athens: [video=youtube;DzXMgIcxkfY]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzXMgIcxkfY[/video] One problem is that Acts claims in 17:17 that Paul visited a synagogue there, yet there is no evidence of Jews in Athens or of a Synagogue having been there at the time. The narrator also tells us that, despite the claim about an altar inscribed "to an unknown god," we have no evidence that this existed either. Also, he is claimed to have "confounded" the philosophers there, and then having been taken to a trial. The narrator describes how this alleged trial mirrors that of Socrates, suggesting that Acts simply ripped that story off. It could well be that Paul is as mythical a person as Jesus. Certainly we lack extrabiblical evidence for him just as we do for Jesus the Nazarene, and certainly the texts we have about Paul in the Bible do nothing to help his case.
An examination of the claims about Paul visiting Rome: [video=youtube;y2WFIcDO6qA]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2WFIcDO6qA[/video]
From what I know there were cities in Israel that were Greek, and there were synagogues all over the Greek world... leading many to believe the first Christians were really Greeks which had converted to Judaism, rather than Jews. Believing in one God was not uncommon, although they were probably very few.
You are likely picturing some sort of physical building. The word "synagogue" in Greek can refer to any congregation or assembly. Regardless, yes, Paul likely existed. We have his writings.
We certainly have writings attributed to & claiming to be by Paul, although scholars question the authenticity of at least some of those. But then there is also the question of the alleged events of his life to consider. What's most likely true is that early Christians were no different from any other people starting a religion and inventing and passing along fables to support it, including the events alleged in the Book of Acts.
Sure, and those same scholars accept the authenticity of at least some of them. Books like Hebrews are generally doubted while books like Romans are generally accepted. We can get into some of the reasons why, but it takes a lot of twists and turns to explain how Paul would have been completely invented as opposed to a historical figure that was later exaggerated. Occam's Razor cuts the other way on this one. Any standard used to call into question Paul's existence would basically call into question every historical figure from the time period. Some of the works attributed to Paul arose, according to secular scholars, in the mid first century. Works falsely attributed to that same author were still written under the assumption that first century writers would be familiar with a first century man named Paul, be familiar with his history, and attribute some authority to him. Simply put, creating such a character whole-cloth would have been needlessly complicated in comparison to working off an actual person. Sure, many details were likely inventions -- the same goes for literally every other writer of the time period, without exception. Jumping from that to the claim that Paul himself was an invention is a pretty dramatic leap without much in the way of justification.
Even I am not about to argue that Saul/Paul was necessarily entirely fictitious as a person. Basically, my beef is only with the Bible being regarded religiously as some kind of accurate, literal history of events. You're clearly not one of those who does this, and I think we more or less agree about Paul, quite possibly and even probably a real person who nonetheless came to be embellished in Christian writings, as happens with prophets and the like.
Yes, we're definitely agreed on all of those fronts. Personally, being a fan of Epicureanism, Stoicism and the Socratic method, I would love for the story of the Areopagus to be real. I've used it several times to convince evangelicals to treat neopagans with greater respect, and with great success. Still, while I'll argue that the book of Romans tells us a lot about the historical Paul, Acts tells us little beyond Paul's (likely) appeal among Hellenistic Jews and his lack of reputation among more traditional Jews and early Christians.
I know there were many Jews in Corinth, so there had to be in Athens and the cities in Asia Minor. My daughter met a Jewish man once who told her he was more Greek than the Greeks, since his ancestry went back to ancient Athens. Anyway the Greeks were maritime people and they did establish colonies, so there was commerce all over the Mediterranean and Black Sea area... This of course would have drawn Jewish traders and merchants... and with the traders and merchants there would have been synagogues.
I think the opposite happened, and that fourteen hundred years of Christianity was discarded when the Protestants rebelled against the Catholic Church. The Protestants were Christians, without knowing how they became Christians.
The book of Acts was written quite late.. 80-130 AD.. Paul was long dead and gone. http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/acts.html
What? I'm pretty sure that Luther, Calvin and other Protestants knew their Christianity. If anything it was the Catholic church which had fossilised various Biblical interpretations, leading to them being shattered by the emerging Humanist archaeology. The Reformation has its origin in many, some rather small, things like indulgences, it was not an immediate and total break with the existing Catholic church, let alone with Christianity generally.
You are missing the point. If the so called reformers were Christians, then how did they become Christian? Who made them Christian? What I'm trying to say is that there were thousands of saints/martyrs starting with the disciples that risked their lives to preach to a very pagan world. Christianity in Europe didn't just pop up out of no where.
There were a lot of books. It was the Church fathers guided by the Holy Spirit that decided which teachings to accept and which not to accept.
Most certainly were. After the Maccabean rebellion, circa 160BCE, Hellenised Jews spread throughout the area in Egypt and in Greece. Philo the historian names over a dozen places where Jews had settled. Where Jews settle there there are synagogues. Not necessarily large imposing buildings that perhaps we would recognise today. The reason for the Septuagint was to translate Hebrew into Greek as the lingua franca of the day for descendants of Jews who had fled the Babylonian invasion centuries before and were also known to have travelled widely throughout the Middle East. They had learnt new languages to survive and Hebrew had begun to die out as a spoken language. This has nothing to do with whether Paul existed or not.
Sure looks that way. The Hellenization of Judaism http://alkman1.blogspot.com/2007/06/hellenization-of-judaism.html
