Corpus-Paul

[Licia Kuenning <Licia AT compuserve.com>]

Jim West writes,

> {Jake}
>> Conventionally put, "Was the Gospel *of* Jesus supplanted
>> by Paul's Gospel *about* Jesus?"
>
> Yes, it was.  Or, in the terms of one famous exegete--- "the
> proclaimer became the proclaimed".  The message of Jesus
> and the message of Paul are utterly different- Jesus speaks
> of God, and Paul speaks of Jesus.

This is the sort of misunderstanding I regularly find on
nonacademic lists: I don't expect to find it here.  Paul's
letters are not Paul's gospel.  If one is looking for Paul's
gospel one has to find it in the brief accounts he gives in two
or three places of what message he preached when he first
came to town.

When one does I think one finds it is essentially the same
message Peter preached in Acts.  Of course one can
question whether the account in Acts is historically true,
but one can't just presuppose that it isn't.

One should not expect to find an account, in Paul's
epistles, of the sayings or life of Jesus.  The converts would
have received some such account in some form, in some
context, but the epistles were written to address specific
issues that arose in the churches.

> It is for no small reason that Paul is seen as the founder
> of Christianity- 

I for one don't see him that way.  If Christianity didn't
exist before Paul took it up, what was he persecuting?

> In Jesus, justification comes about by repentence
> and behavior.  For Paul it occurs when one "believes".

They are talking about two different things.  I think
"justification by faith" is Paul's rationale for his position
on Jewish-Gentile relations.  It is like Paul to spin out a
theological rationale for positions he takes on practical
issues.  We shouldn't assume that it represented the core
of Christianity for Paul just because it occupies a lot of
space in the documents we happen to have.

> There was no NT until the 4th century.

It's my understanding that there were NT collections by the
mid 2nd century.  (But of course that isn't what Bill Ross
was talking about.)

Licia Kuenning

Licia AT compuserve.com
kuenning-licia AT voicenet.com