Is Paul reliable?

I don’t necessarily think he was lying, though that doesn’t mean he was taking instructions from the risen Jesus. Even so, he’s the closest source we have before 63AD when Rome leveled Jerusalem in response to the Jewish Revolt, which the messianic zealots started in hopes of bring on the long prophesied Messiah. 

I’ve seen several of this podcaster’s videos. He has an ex-fundamentalist chip on his shoulder, but he has set up a platform for religious studies scholars to get beyond the Ivory Tower and get some this scholarship out to folks who need to hear it. 

How would you know? The Gospel writers seem to have had a Pauline influence so we can't easily separate the historical Christ from Pauline theology.

Muslims who say that St. Paul was a false apostle usually quote this saying of Christ:

Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.-Matthew 5:17 (King James Version)

Just because someone wants to believe something, that doesn't make it true. And people who do this give themselves away with such comments as "because the average life expectancy was 24" in order to convince themselves that no one lives to be 48. 

The first followers of Jesus didn't have access to the best papyrus, nor the best places to store papyrus, nor the most stable places to store scrolls, having to move out in a hurry quite often. They were persecuted well up to the reign of Constantine. When historians say an emperor was not actively suppressing them, it meant that the emperor wasn't going out of his way to suppress them, but they were still the scapegoats for anything that happened.

This led to a lot of copying from scrolls by their ill equipped scribes. Not "ill trained scribes", just "ill equipped scribes". It's like sending a farmers to grow crops in a desert and giving them seed packets that were stored in mildew and fertilizer from Monsanto. 

Now, the question of whether Paul is reliable. He's more of a sadomasochist than any of the apostles. If fishermen were masochistic on the Sea of Galilee, they wouldn't live to be 10 years old. 

Paul, however, had a different personality. The apostles were more into survival. When Jesus was crucified, they still had at least four direct descendants of David from the four brothers mentioned, along with whatever sons those four had, to look for a new Messiah, and that's what they obviously hoped for. They were not at all happy when they learned that they were going to have to tell a story that they knew would get them stoned to death (and that's if they were lucky. It more likely meant they would be burned alive, flayed alive, or beheaded).


Now, Paul isn't as reliable, because of his sadistic and masochistic History. I'll agree with that. But Mark and Luke weren't likely to be masochistic.  Matthew and John surely weren't masochistic. Only an idiot would think that Matthew didn't actually bring about his first rendition of his gospel. The fact that there was no stability of resources, papyrus, scrolls, or places to store these resources means that people had to continually copy them in a tedious process. Only the most deranged and demon possessed idiot would hold onto the idea that dozens of scribes would agree to "rewrite" the original story with pretty much the exact same rewrites. But we have such idiots who call themselves "historians", and gullible morons who want to deify those idiots.


The lady in the video proves my point. As do many of the morons here.


No offense.

You're going to believe whatever you want to believe. The sign of the ignorant sheep is that they say "if it's in the Bible I demand the opposite be true, nyah, nyah, nyah". 

And ironically, the ignorant sheep never even ask why they delight in their ignorance for motivation, as if it can be something that isn't supernatural. Ironic how you illustrate this so well, and yet you will never admit that your mind is closed to reality.