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One of the things that I've learned here that surprises me, is how much Paul is responsible for what we call Christianity, rather than Jesus.
And what a dishonourable person he seems to have been.
My take on Paul isn't focused on honorable/dishonorable, rather I see him as the product of an extremist personality. When he was Saul, the Romanized Jew who went about rounding up the heretic Christians who challenged the legitimacy of the Temple faction, he was a hard core zealot, someone who really believed that he was doing the righteous work of Yahweh and Roman civilization in general.
After the traumatic incident which brought about his conversion (sunstroke?) he became the leading zealot on behalf of the same people he formally was trying to eradicate.
Paul was a zealot, that is what is important about Paul. Whatever direction his life had taken, he would have gone at it full bore with the deep conviction that what he was doing was sanctioned by divine authority. As it turned out, his cause was the promotion of Jesus, but I think that it could easily have been something else, and Paul would have been just as fanatic and driven about it.
How do we most commonly view fanatics/zealots today? Most see them as fringe figures, as possibly mentally ill people, as socially maladjusted people. We see the doctrines which they are promoting as the product of those mental/psychological deficiencies.
That is probably the best way to look at Paul, and if he had been unsuccessful in getting Christianity entrenched in the Roman empire, but he wasn't lost to history, that is precisely how most of us would be looking at the life of Paul. He was that whack job that went around pushing a long discredited cult doctrine.
My take on Paul isn't focused on honorable/dishonorable, rather I see him as the product of an extremist personality. When he was Saul, the Romanized Jew who went about rounding up the heretic Christians who challenged the legitimacy of the Temple faction, he was a hard core zealot, someone who really believed that he was doing the righteous work of Yahweh and Roman civilization in general.
After the traumatic incident which brought about his conversion (sunstroke?) he became the leading zealot on behalf of the same people he formally was trying to eradicate.
Paul was a zealot, that is what is important about Paul. Whatever direction his life had taken, he would have gone at it full bore with the deep conviction that what he was doing was sanctioned by divine authority. As it turned out, his cause was the promotion of Jesus, but I think that it could easily have been something else, and Paul would have been just as fanatic and driven about it.
How do we most commonly view fanatics/zealots today? Most see them as fringe figures, as possibly mentally ill people, as socially maladjusted people. We see the doctrines which they are promoting as the product of those mental/psychological deficiencies.
That is probably the best way to look at Paul, and if he had been unsuccessful in getting Christianity entrenched in the Roman empire, but he wasn't lost to history, that is precisely how most of us would be looking at the life of Paul. He was that whack job that went around pushing a long discredited cult doctrine.
I think your description of Paul is a very accurate one. "Whack job, fanatic and driven" are the key words to describe his character.
It doesn't sound Holy spirit inspired to me, either, which is why I see it as Paul writing a thesis (Romans) to reason his way to where he wants to get to: the Law is not necessary for Gentiles: only Faith in Jesus.
While he may have claimed that Jesus gave him all this stuff during their coffee -morning in the Third heaven, in fact it is pretty clear that he is working it all out for himself in a very mundane rationalizing way.
I'm just saying that passage isn't really to be taken as an admission that he is lying.
How can Paul be the Apostle to the Gentiles when Peter stated the he himself was chosen for that task?...
I think your description of Paul is a very accurate one. "Whack job, fanatic and driven" are the key words to describe his character.
Obviously, you think very little of him. We get that. But your twisting of his writing was almost laughable. You attempted to make it say the exact opposite of what it actually says in context. Any 5th grader ought to be able to read that passage and see what he actually said.
Obviously, you think very little of him. We get that. But your twisting of his writing was almost laughable. You attempted to make it say the exact opposite of what it actually says in context. Any 5th grader ought to be able to read that passage and see what he actually said.
How can Paul be the Apostle to the Gentiles when Peter stated the he himself was chosen for that task?...
After reading the verses in which Paul is claimed to have lied I have read them within the context of his whole message and he was not lying but he might have been endorsing lying to gain converts.
And that is coming from some one who is Anti-Paul,
He was not lying, read his whole message in those chapters.
Even though I am Anti-Paul I will not say he was a liar with out proof,
His beliefs where grounded in a Faith just as mine are even if they are different faiths.
Belief in faith if incorrect does not make one a liar it means they lack knowledge to know the facts.
After reading the verses in which Paul is claimed to have lied I have read them within the context of his whole message and he was not lying but he might have been endorsing lying to gain converts.
And that is coming from some one who is Anti-Paul,
He was not lying, read his whole message in those chapters.
Even though I am Anti-Paul I will not say he was a liar with out proof,
His beliefs where grounded in a Faith just as mine are even if they are different faiths.
Belief in faith if incorrect does not make one a liar it means they lack knowledge to know the facts.
How can Paul be the Apostle to the Gentiles when Peter stated the he himself was chosen for that task?...
Good question. I certainly get the impression that Simon Peter/Cephus was a man with a commission to the Christians at Antioch, and I can't be sure yet just how Gentile they were. Paul himself says that there was a commune of Jews and gentiles and Peter at first ate with the Gentiles, but then withdrew because of religious scruples. Unless Paul is lying, I have to give this account some weight.
But the taking of Paul's gospel, which I believe was rather different from the one he had got from the disciples, to the pagan Greeks of Asia Minor and then Achea, was his own particular apostolic mission. It was his own idea - nobody in the Jesus party asked him to do it. His epistles (IICor on) show that he was passing the hat round, not just to fund his own efforts, but to Buy his mission approval in Jerusalem, because he was collecting Famine relief (Judean famine of 45 AD) for the 'Saints', the 'Elect' or the 'Meek'. Which is to say Ebionites, and that means the Jesus community in Jerusalem. So when Paul claims that, after the council of Jerusalem of 51 AD, he was enjoined to 'remember the poor', (the 'meek' or 'Elect/Saints') he replies that he had been doing this already.
My take (or Pet theory, it has been called) is that we cannot unquestioningly trust the NT account. The gospels are written by Pauline Christians, not Jesus' disciples, and they put into Jesus' mouth Gentile -Christian views that he never would have used. Acts, essentially a biography of Paul and his mission, is by Luke, apparently, and cannot be trusted. He lies about the reason Paul had to escape from Damascus. Paul says that it was to escape the Nabatean occupation, but Luke blames it on a Jewish plot to kill him. That is touchstone evidence of the Jew -hating agenda underlying the whole of the Gospel and Acts.
Paul, being earlier, did not hate Jews - he was one himself, but he did dislike the Mosaic law, and became hostile to the 'Super- apostles' when they began to 'teach a different gospel' to the one he'd been peddling around the greek world. I doubt not that it was one putting more emphasis on the Mosaic Law observances that Paul (or the gentiles) liked.
I have to take on board the Noachian laws (sometimes called Noahide, but that sounds like something you make cheap shoes out of) which allows gentiles a place in the coming Kingdom through just abstaining from Idols, fornication, strangled things and blood. I suspect there is some problem I am missing - that these came in later, that the exact 'place' in the kingdom might have been hewing the wod and drawing the water for their Jewish masters, under the Rule of the messiah, or we still had a problem with the sabbath, ritual laws and circumcision, because the Gospels hack away at the sabbath, in particular, the Temple as a centre of worship and circumcision and the rituals of Jewish observances. If the Noachian laws were all that was needed to get the gentiles the 'promise of Abraham' I cannot see why that problem arose.
After reading the verses in which Paul is claimed to have lied I have read them within the context of his whole message and he was not lying but he might have been endorsing lying to gain converts.
And that is coming from some one who is Anti-Paul,
He was not lying, read his whole message in those chapters.
Even though I am Anti-Paul I will not say he was a liar with out proof,
His beliefs where grounded in a Faith just as mine are even if they are different faiths.
Belief in faith if incorrect does not make one a liar it means they lack knowledge to know the facts.
I agree. He is a twister, rather than a liar. He does not tell complete lies but I am sure that he craftily presents a slanted version of the facts to suit himself. Both in his use of scripture to support his theists/gospel, in his dealings with his own converts, and the way he represents the other apostles.
He does, as you suggest, say frankly that he can switch hats, or masks, rather to play the jew or the gentile in order to get converts, or keep them on line. Given that he thought this was unimportant because Faith in Jesus was all that mattered, he is lying to himself, at least, because in Romans, he stated that observance of Jewish law was required of all Jews.
This he saw as a burden, and it seems clear that he wasn't very observant and felt guilty about it. I have little doubt that it was seeing faith in the risen messiah as a get out of this problem that cause Paul's 'conversion', not Luke's Damascus blindness story in Acts, which Paul of course tacitly denies by omission.
Therefore, in playing the gentile to gentiles, he is flouting the Jewish Law he says (in Romans) is incumbent (and a burden that gains them nothing) on all Jews. No wonder he snarls at peter, who at least ate with Gentiles, when under instructions from Jerusalem (the 'circumcision party' which has to be James, the leader of the nazorenes after Jesus' execution) he withdrew from eating with gentiles.
This conflict between Jewish law and custom and Christianity, which regarded all such requirements of anyone professing to worship God as not only of no help to faith but a positive Bar to it, is what the Gospels are all about.
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which is why I see it as Paul writing a thesis (Romans) to reason his way to where he wants to get to: the Law is not necessary for Gentiles: only Faith in Jesus. 
