edStueart wrote:Or perhaps they are pointed at 'the Paul that we know', brought to you by Marcion (and Joel Olstien).
Except much of what we have of Paul's writings, particularly the ones Yada uses in QP, are Pre-Marcion.
wrote:Rabbi Sha'ul was a pharisee until the day he died.
If this is true than it is more damning than anything in QP, because Yahushua referred to the Pharisee as a brood of vipers, and the sons of Satan. Others mentioned in Acts are referred to as former Pharisee, if Paul never renounced his association with this group then he could not have been a follower of Yahushua.
wrote:If anything, he would have been more uptight about Torah observance than Yeshua would have appeared to be.
I would have to disagree the Pharisee weren't Torah observant, they were interested in their Oral Law, not Yahuweh's Torah. Had they been Torah observant they would have recognized Yahushua for who he was.
wrote:The letters that we have that are attributed to him are quite likely to have been tampered with and may not have captured all of Rabbi Sha'ul's entire message. Haven't we all dashed off an e-mail message (or YY posting) (KP) that really didn't correctly expressed everything in just the right way? The letters that were omitted from the 'canon' by the Council of Nicea may have been dropped because they sounded to Jew-ey for Constantine and Company.
The letters we have are all we have. It is all we have on which to determine what Paul taught. And again the ones we have all predate Necea. And since, at least that I am aware of, we have no other letters that could be attributed to Paul that predate this, and we have copies of most of Paul's letters that date to within 150 years of his life, pre-Nicea and pre-Marcion. All we can do is judge the letters we have and compare them to Scripture.
And if Rob, and Swalchy are right and Paul didn't write Galatians, then we should condemn Galatians, and review the rest of "Paul's" letters, and based on their contents decide rather to condemn them or not. All we can really say is the Paul of Christianity is wrong. Now if we can distance the real Paul from every letter that is attributed to him that has his teachings then great, the problem really is that much of the same stuff in Galatians comes up elsewhere in his other letters, but we should review all of them individually.
wrote:I can read Galatians and see no conflict with Torah-observance for both Hebrew and Gentile followers of The Way, if I go into it with the presumption that the author was a Pharisee who was a follower of the Risen Messiah.
No offense, but what is the difference between that, and Christian's who read Scripture with the preconceived notions of Christianity, they have made up their mind on what they believe, and are finding Scriptural verification for it, and dismissing anything that conflicts with their preconceived notion.
And i believe "a Pharisee who was a follower of the Risen Messiah" is an oxymoron. To follow Yahushua, he would have had to leave the Pharisees.
wrote:If you start with the premise of "Rabbi Sha'ul", rather than that of "Saint Paul", many, many, many of the "difficult" passages in 'his' letters just melt away.
Again, we should read the words as much as possible without preconceived notions. We have to look at the words he wrote objectively.
wrote:Are his letters scripture, I think not. Are they useful, certainly! The difficult passages can be easily handled by my "How To Deal With Paul" <tm> kit (order one before midnight tonight, operators are standing by!) by saying "I'm not quite sure what Rabbi Sha'ul was saying here..." or "Perhaps this text has been tampered with, be cause we have NO record of him turning in his Pharisee badge and gun ever..."
I am in complete agreement that Paul's letters were not and should never have been considered Scripture. I would go so far as to say most of the RC is not Scripture.
I agree with Marcus your kit is missing an option. When it comes to something Yahuweh said then yeah it is one of your two options, but with Paul, as with anyone else we have to consider the third option, that that person was lying, mislead, or didn't understand.
I think your last point here is important. I think Paul really never left his Pharisee mindset, he continued to see things that way, and that is why he was wrong.