Now you are confusing three different things!Bernard Muller wrote: ↑Fri Mar 01, 2019 3:55 pm to Ben,From a Christian perspective, sure. That would be sacrilege, horrific, and opening a whole can of worms.... Nobody thinks that Paul is personally confessing to being a pious liar in Romans 3.7 ...
But some nowadays see Paul would be consider a liar by Jews: As example, from a certain Bill Cummings:
https://www.macon.com/opinion/opn-colum ... 58704.htmlHowever, Bill says Paul did not think he was lying, but believed in his (alleged) visions!!! Good excuse."What do I think James did? Well, James was a faithful Jew just like his brother, Jesus. Paul, on the other hand, was a transformed Jew, transformed into following an image of the “Christos;” an image created by a vision with a broken connection to the Judaism of Jesus (2:2). James obviously didn’t share the Pauline vision; instead, he remembered the actual words and actions of his Jewish brother, and when Paul said, “We are justified by faith in the Christos, not by the works of the Torah” (Gal.2:16), I think James, a lover of the Torah, might have screamed, “Liar! Liar!”
We know Paul was called a liar many times, and not just by James. Paul was forced to defend himself time after time in his epistles. He starts a paragraph in Romans by saying, “I speak the truth; I am not lying” (Rom. 9:1). In his second letter to the Christians in Corinth, he outlines all the problems he’s had and then adds, “I am not lying” (2 Cor. 11:31). This same theme is repeated in 1 Tim. 2:7 where he says he was “appointed” as an apostle, and then: “I am telling the truth; I am not lying.”"
- Did Paul unknowingly tell untruths? (In this case, Paul is wrong, but not a liar.)
- Did Paul knowingly tell untruths? (In this case, Paul is both wrong and a liar.)
- Did Paul admit to telling untruths? (In this case, Paul is both wrong and a liar, except about this point.)
Okay, so my "nobody" goes too far. This person is wrong, too, just like you are. (I was referring mainly to scholars and to informed students of the text, and I do not know who this person is.)There are others thinking the same as I do about Ro 3:7:
See https://jdstone.org/cr/files/pauladmits ... fraud.html"Paul, in his zealot exaltation, admits and justifies, on Jesuitical principles, the preaching of falsehood, and feels really aggrieved that honest men should take exceptions to such mendacious propaganda:
"For if the truth of God hath more abounded through my lie unto his glory; why yet am I also judged as a sinner?" (Rom. 3.7)
In a spirit of good-humored naiveté he winks at the flock of Corinthians whom he has hooked into the fold, and admits that he had tricked them:
"Though the more abundantly I love you, the less I be loved. But be it so: ... nevertheless, being crafty, I caught you with guile." (2 Cor. 12.15-16)
As a "man that striveth for the mastery" (1 Cor. 9.25), Paul expounds to the church leaders the modus operandi of the successful propagandist:
"I made myself servant unto all, that I might gain the more. And unto the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain the Jews; to them that are under the law, as under the law, that I might gain them that are under the law; To them that are without law, as without law, that I might gain them that are without law. ... I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some. And this I do for the gospel's sake" (1 Cor. 9.19-23)."
I am not even sure why you think your argument is attractive, let alone strong. Do you really think that Paul, out of the blue, confessed to piously lying here, after having vehemently denied lying several times before? Do you really not see the rhetorical devices in effect in this chapter of Romans?