The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul

by Robert M Price PhD

Overview

The story of Paul is one of irony, the New Testament depicting him at the martyrdom of Stephen holding the assassins' cloaks. Then this same Paul is transformed into the biblical archetype for someone suffering for their faith. He becomes so entrenched, it would appear that he had walked with the Christians all his life, that he was the one who defined the faith, eventually being called the “second founder of Christianity.” But much of what we think we "know" about Paul comes from Sunday school stories we heard as children. The stories were didactic tales meant to keep us reverent and obedient.

As adults reading the New Testament, we catch glimpses of a very different kind of disciple—a wild ascetic whom Tertullian dubbed “the second apostle of Marcion and the apostle of the heretics.” What does scholarship tell us about the enigmatic thirteenth apostle who looms larger than life in the New Testament? The epistles give evidence of having been written at the end of the first century or early in the second—too late to have been Paul’s actual writings. So who wrote (and rewrote) them? F. C. Baur, a nineteenth-century theologian, pointed persuasively to Simon Magus as the secret identity of “Paul.” Robert M. Price, in this exciting journey of discovery, gives readers the background for a story we thought we knew.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781560852162
Publisher:	Signature Books, Incorporated
Publication date:	12/03/2012
Edition description:	1
Pages:	580
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.30(d)
Age Range:	14 Years

About the Author

 Robert M. Price holds two doctoral degrees in theology and New Testament from Drew University. He is Professor of Scriptural Studies at the Johnnie Colemon Theological Seminary, traveling lecturer for the Center for Inquiry Institute in Amherst, New York, and editor of the Journal of Higher Criticism. His books include Deconstructing Jesus, The Pre-Nicene New Testament, The Reason-Driven Life, and The Widow Traditions in Luke-Acts: A Feminist-Critical Scrutiny. He has published in the American Rationalist, Evangelical Quarterly, Journal of Psychology and Theology, Reformed Journal, and elsewhere.

Read an Excerpt

 The Perils of Pauline Studies

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, it is a strange time for Pauline studies. After seemingly having run out of other ideas to beat to death, the academy has ventured into new territory. One might even say that, on analogy with the intrepid Netherlanders of old, Pauline scholars have created new territory to settle. A visit to the seminary book store or the religion aisle at Barnes & Noble will acquaint the reader with books arguing that Paul was a culture critic of Hellenistic Judaism, that he was a Jew and remained a Jew, that he wrote against U.S. foreign policy, and so on. Indeed, more than ever, he seems like a new Oracle of Delphi whose equivocal utterances may be read as conveying whatever message one most wants to hear. Like the infamous “historical Jesus,” Paul has become a reflection of the scholars studying him.

Part of the reason for this state of affairs is that Jesus has recently been unavailable for these uses. As scholars have become more skeptical about recovering the goods on the historical Jesus (as witness the Jesus Seminar’s claim that only 18 percent of the sayings database was reliable), the less plausible it has seemed to make him the poster boy for green politics, feminism, whatever. Granted, this hasn’t stopped a number of scholars who still write books manufacturing and manicuring Jesus to look like them, since the less evidence there is, the more room is left for speculation; but some have retreated to Paul instead. Perhaps he can be the bulwark theologians once thought they had in Jesus. But great ironies lie this way.

First, the closer scrutiny the Pauline texts receive, the clearer it becomes (and by now it seems mighty clear indeed) that the epistles present us with many of the same challenges the Gospels did. They appear to be filled with the same variety of redactional seams, non-sequiturs, and double-audience rhetorical tricks we find in the Gospels. In short, the historical Jesus problem replicates itself in the case of Paul. The epistles reveal themselves to the discerning reader to have exactly the same sort of limitations as the Gospels do: both are collections of fragments and pericopae contributed and fabricated by authors and communities of very different theological leanings. Both present barriers to the access of the individuals under whose names they appear, not open doors.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Deconstructing Paul vii

1 The Legend of Paul's Conversion 1

2 By Posthumous Post 25

3 The Evolution of the Pauline Canon 45

4 The Apocalypses and Acts of Paul 89

5 The Original Gnostic Apostles 131

6 Paulus Absconditus 173

7 The Secret of Simon Magus 185

8 Salvation and Stratification 235

9 The Epistle to the Romans 253

10 First Corinthians 299

11 Second Corinthians 377

12 Galatians 411

13 Laodiceans and Ephesians 437

14 Philippians 455

15 Colossians 469

16 Thessalonians 483

17 The Letter to Philemon 501

18 The Pastoral Epistles 505

Conclusion: A Canticle for Paul 533

Index 537