Re: The Solution to the Problem of 'Paul'
Posted: Wed Oct 01, 2014 1:34 pm
Thank you. A reasonable question. Here's where we start.
1. The Marcionite tradition was the original surviving Pauline tradition. They denied Acts and rejected the identification of Paul as Saul.
2. The Marcionite recension of the Pauline corpus did not have the long 'personal recognition' sections at the end of letters (as evidenced by Origen's statement about the 'abrupt' ending of Romans among other bits of information. Moreover Tertullian tells us that NO INFORMATION was forthcoming from the Marcionite canon about the identity of Paul he is shrouded in complete mystery, deliberately.
So who was Paul for the heretics? Not Saul. Not a student of Gamaliel and all the other baloney that has made its way to the Catholic canon. Where do we start reconstructing who he was. We start with various mystical references by the apostle that he was 'father' to the rest of the community (albeit unrecognized as such by others outside of the community) thus conforming to the figure of an ancient priest or Pope. But perhaps more significantly is the reference to the apostle as 'wise architect' or 'master builder.' This IMO is the clearest self-identification of the apostle as a 'supercharged' Demiurge, Yahweh who has been restored with his missing half Elohim (= Jesus), a 'spiritualized' being who created this world.
My guess would be that Paul was the first to bear Jesus in his soul and thus served not only to 'represent' the repentance of the Demiurge but also that of all those 'sons of Adam' (Adam identified to be the 'phaulos man' by the heretics) = the phauloi (notice fits with the strange silence of why there were no references to a group called 'those of Paul' in earliest Christian antiquity).
I admit that's not much in terms of identifying who Paul was but since Plato identified the Demiurge as phaulos and early Christians seem particularly attached to Plato it stands to reason in my mind that the apostle's self-identification with the Demiurge is likely to have been the origin of the title Paulos (via Aramaic where φαῦλος = ܦܘܠܘܤ = Παῦλος by means of the Aramaic spelling. In other words while φαῦλος is spelled with a phi, it is transliterated into Aramaic with pey which is the equivalent of pi as in Παῦλος. There are two different letters in Greek but pey takes the role of both phi and pi. That's where the confusion lay and the orthodox when they took over the apostolic writings took the title as a personal name and developed a mythical narrative about an Odyssean figure with the Roman name of Paulus (never quite explained in Acts but 'hinted' to have some relation to Sergius Paulus but what? He was so in love with the man he took his name ) to fill the void in the occultated figure of the apostle in the heretical tradition.
1. The Marcionite tradition was the original surviving Pauline tradition. They denied Acts and rejected the identification of Paul as Saul.
2. The Marcionite recension of the Pauline corpus did not have the long 'personal recognition' sections at the end of letters (as evidenced by Origen's statement about the 'abrupt' ending of Romans among other bits of information. Moreover Tertullian tells us that NO INFORMATION was forthcoming from the Marcionite canon about the identity of Paul he is shrouded in complete mystery, deliberately.
So who was Paul for the heretics? Not Saul. Not a student of Gamaliel and all the other baloney that has made its way to the Catholic canon. Where do we start reconstructing who he was. We start with various mystical references by the apostle that he was 'father' to the rest of the community (albeit unrecognized as such by others outside of the community) thus conforming to the figure of an ancient priest or Pope. But perhaps more significantly is the reference to the apostle as 'wise architect' or 'master builder.' This IMO is the clearest self-identification of the apostle as a 'supercharged' Demiurge, Yahweh who has been restored with his missing half Elohim (= Jesus), a 'spiritualized' being who created this world.
My guess would be that Paul was the first to bear Jesus in his soul and thus served not only to 'represent' the repentance of the Demiurge but also that of all those 'sons of Adam' (Adam identified to be the 'phaulos man' by the heretics) = the phauloi (notice fits with the strange silence of why there were no references to a group called 'those of Paul' in earliest Christian antiquity).
I admit that's not much in terms of identifying who Paul was but since Plato identified the Demiurge as phaulos and early Christians seem particularly attached to Plato it stands to reason in my mind that the apostle's self-identification with the Demiurge is likely to have been the origin of the title Paulos (via Aramaic where φαῦλος = ܦܘܠܘܤ = Παῦλος by means of the Aramaic spelling. In other words while φαῦλος is spelled with a phi, it is transliterated into Aramaic with pey which is the equivalent of pi as in Παῦλος. There are two different letters in Greek but pey takes the role of both phi and pi. That's where the confusion lay and the orthodox when they took over the apostolic writings took the title as a personal name and developed a mythical narrative about an Odyssean figure with the Roman name of Paulus (never quite explained in Acts but 'hinted' to have some relation to Sergius Paulus but what? He was so in love with the man he took his name ) to fill the void in the occultated figure of the apostle in the heretical tradition.