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Subject: Corpus-Paul

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  • From: "David Inglis" <david AT colonialcommerce.com>
  • To: corpus-paul AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: Did Jesus or angels speak to Paul?
  • Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2002 18:46:51 -0400


I would like to enquire if it is allowed to even discuss on this list (or
any related lists) whether Paul did (or even could) have actually received
information from a resurrected Jesus or from angels. It seems to me that
to disallow this possibility completely shows a rather closed 'mind set'.

I understand that in the current scientific age a belief in spiritual
things is looked on by some as a kind of 'mental weakness', but I don't
believe that a true scholarly approach should reject out of hand a genuine
spiritual explanation of, for example, Paul's actions. Instead, it would
seem more reasonable to me to allow spiritual explanations as one of a
number of possibilities, and only reject those explanations if the
evidence does not fit, rather than rejecting them prior to even examining
the evidence.

For example, to date parts of the NT to after the fall of Jerusalem on the
grounds that prophecies about the fall are 'spiritual', and hence to
reject for this reason any possibility that these parts of the NT *could*
predate the fall is, I believe, actually not scholarly. To bring the
matter back to Paul, IHMO Paul's words and actions can only be explained
by one of the following:

. Paul really was spoken to by Jesus on the road to Damascus;
. Paul had a 'brain storm' which caused him to really believe that he
was spoken to by Jesus;
. Paul invented the whole thing;
. It was all an invention of someone else, and perhaps Paul never even
existed.

IMHO the third and fourth options are total non-starters, unless
Christianity is simply a scam and all the apostles (if they even existed!)
were also in on it too. If discussing the first option is totally 'out of
court', then it seems to me that all is left is number two: Paul believed
his own propaganda but was deceived. Does it really come down to this?

Dave Inglis
david AT colonialcommerce.com
3538 O'Connor Drive
Lafayette, CA, USA




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