Fabricating History: The popular image of St Paul is selectively crafted from two sources: the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles which bear his name. Yet the two sources actually present two radically different individuals and two wildly divergent stories. Each relies on the other for coherence yet simultaneously requires an arbitrary selection of "fact" from the wealth of patent nonsense.
Viewed without the rose-tinted spectacles of Christian faith, the first voyage of Paul is as fanciful as the first voyage of Sinbad. Improbable, unlikely incidents are juxtaposed with the miraculous and the ridiculous. Faith can offer special pleas for every incongruity but logical thinking cannot
Acts records the apostle's presence at major cities like Athens, Thessalonika and Ephesus and minor towns like Derbe and Mitylene, yet Paul's epistles confirm very little of this grand tour. In the New Testament yarn Paul visited Corinth on his second missionary journey, stayed eighteen months and founded the Corinthian church. Two letters ostensibly written to the Christians of Corinth form the core of "authentic" Pauline epistles. But was it friction or fiction in Roman Greece?
St Paul's supposed journeys have more symbolism than realism. Taking a closer look at the military colony where the apostle is said to have converted a seller of purple and his gaoler and founded the first church in Europe. Paul's presence in Philippi is decidedly dubious.
The Church "tradition" of Paul's voyage to Rome, followed by a martyr's death, cannot survive rational scrutiny. The fable may well owe its origin to the works of Josephus, the cornucopia of the Christian fraudsters.
At least three countries lay claim to the site of Paul's shipwreck, all backed up by local "traditions," venerable artefacts and the insistence of local clergy and entrepreneurs. But the tale of maritime adventure is a pious fantasy and all three claims are bogus.
Did Paul really invent Christianity? Purportedly, Paul, tireless founder of churches and evangelist extraordinaire, is also the first – and most influential – theologian of the Church. Whoever wrote in the name of Paul combined elements from Judaism, Gnosticism, and the Mystery religions to produce the winning formula.
The historicity of the super-apostle, vexed by troubles on all sides, warily asserting (re-asserting?) authority over "his" churches by stern letters, is not compelling. The "authentic voice" within the epistles is that of an authoritarian churchman. His call to "follow traditions" and "obey written rules" is clearly anachronistic and moves the epistles into a later age than purported for a 1st century apostle.
Christianity was NOT propagated by the "bold evangelism" of a handful of fearless apostles, filled with the Holy Spirit and energized by their personal experiences of a resurrected godman. In fact, no evidence links Paul to the major Christian churches – the story in the Acts of the Apostles is a pious invention.
Paul's letters are not what they appear to be – and more to the point, not when they appear to be. NOT ONE of the early Christian churches in the major cities of the Roman world owed anything to a pioneering apostle called Paul. Almost everything we think we know about Paul comes not from his own writings but from Acts of the Apostles, the great work of Catholic harmonization. As the Catholics successfully assimilated their Marcionite and Gnostic opponents, the legendary Paul was reworked in Acts. What we have in Paul is not a super-apostle but a superlative fraud. |
