I figured that much already. I'm just not sure why you want to have a religious conversation with me. I strongly suspect your "way of Jesus" and mine are not only different, but exactly opposite.
because you were spreading falsehoods about Paul who is a brother in Christ
Really? name one thing I said that is a falsehood or a lie?
Maybe because I have doubts about the existence of a historical Paul. But, what if my doubts are founded? Who was Paul and where did he come from? We actually know very little about the early life of Paul, which itself is suspicious for someone
so important. What we do know is that he's from a place called Tarsus, which is part of the Jewish diaspora in what is now modern Turkey. He himself was Jewish by ancestry. But crucially, he was a Roman citizen. And this is extremely rare for a Jewish person. You could only become a Roman citizen in three ways. First, you could be born to citizen parents, which is probably Paul's situation. He tells us in the Bible, I was born a Roman citizen. Therefore, my parents were citizens. This means his family was very wealthy and part of the Roman elite. Second, you could earn citizenship by serving in the Roman military for 20 years. Third, you could be granted citizenship by the emperor as a reward for exceptional service to the state. So, it's very hard to be a Roman citizen. Only a small percentage of people in empire had citizenship. But Paul was a citizen which gave him enormous privileges. He could appeal directly to the emperor. Local authorities had to treat him with respect.
Paul converted and became a Pharisee. Now, Pharisees were Jewish religious teachers who would eventually evolve into rabbis. And as a Pharisee, Paul was apparently very fanatical. We know that converts often become more extreme than people born into a tradition. And as a Pharisee, Paul was supposedly tasked with destroying the Jesus movement because it was heresy. Jesus claimed to be the Messiah, but according to the Pharisees, he wasn't. Therefore, his followers were spreading false teachings. But wait, this makes no sense. After Jesus death James the Just and the followers of Jesus were in Jerusalem and they were being protected and honored by the Pharisees. So why would the Pharisees send Paul to destroy the movement they were protecting in their own city? This is a major contradiction that no one has adequately explained, in my opinion. And I'm allowed to have my own opinion, is that right?
I'm saying Paul was changed from the pharisee known as Saul, that is the power of Jesus. The other apostles were suspicious too and that got sorted.
How do we even know Robert Frost wrote that poem? We weren't there..
(There are processes in place)
You can have all the opinions you'd like but when you display them as fact you take it to a different level where I'm able to do the same because I trust the Lord in what He says and wrote as absolute Truth.
when you display them as fact you take it to a different level
I just replied to someone else who apparently knows you, SwampRangers. I'm just going to copy & paste my reply here. maybe you understand better by reservations when it comes to Paul.
IMO, there are many contradictions in the Bible when it comes to Paul... if you read carefully. To me Paul is nothing more than an intelligence asset working on behalf of Roman imperial interests to neutralize the most dangerous threat the empire had ever faced, Jewish fanaticism.
Let me give you an example, Paul decides to go to Damascus to destroy the Jesus movement there. But on the road to Damascus, something extraordinary happens. He sees a blinding light. He hears the voice of Jesus saying, "Paul, Paul, why are you persecuting me and my people?" And at this moment, Paul has what we now call a Damascus moment, a sudden conversion, a complete reversal of belief. And Paul at this point becomes a fanatical follower of Jesus, even though he never met Jesus in life and never met any of Jesus's original disciples. This is extremely weird, but he becomes convinced that he understands Jesus's message better than anyone. And he decides he's going to spread this message to everyone throughout the Roman Empire. So what does Paul do? He starts going to synagogues around the empire telling Jews that Jesus is the Messiah. And he begins to build the structure and organization that will become Christianity. Now, at this point, they're not called Christians. They're still Jews. And the Jesus movement is considered a branch of Judaism. But Paul introduces several radical innovations. None of it makes any sense to me.
The first major innovation is Paul's teaching that Jesus is the Messiah and that through faith in Jesus, you will achieve salvation. This is very different from what Jesus himself taught. Jesus taught that it's through good works, through compassion, through love, through helping others that you achieve spiritual liberation. But Paul teaches good works don't matter. What matters is belief. Faith in Jesus as savior. If you believe, then you are saved. If you don't believe, then you are damned. No matter how good a person you are. Think about how radical this shift is. Jesus taught that everyone has the divine spark within them and through right action through cultivating that spark you achieve enlightenment, salvation, liberation. Paul is saying forget all that just believe this specific claim that Jesus is the son of God who died for your sins and you're saved. It's transactional. It's about belief, not about inner transformation.
How can one or two control the narrative if everyone has equal right to speak, Joe?
Is some speech better at controlling narratives than other speech? If so, why wouldn't we all have equal ability to use better speech? If not, how could contributions control narrative when they are nothing but speech?
What is the "narrative" you refer to anyway? Do you mean the tenor of the collective message of all contributions here as received by the readers' minds? How could anyone control that any more so than anyone else?
Perhaps you're speaking of rules? But in the absence of active moderation everyone judges the rules for themselves and they are effectively only an honor code, and rules are about behavior and not narrative; do you perhaps mean that by our desiring enforcement of rules there will be some change as if rulebreakers contribute to narrative in a way that would be harmful to enforce against? That would be an odd conclusion, that the violation of communally selected rules is somehow a benefit to the narrative. You are truly mystifying.
Oh, and was there something you wanted me to listen to or to bend about? Whatever you like, according to only one rule, that I don't bend the good conscience given to me.
Why do you lay stress on Paul "converting" when people who are Jewish by ancestry didn't need to convert? (Becoming a Pharisee wasn't a conversion, it was essentially a handshake and a promise.)
Are you familiar with the many Pharisees who accepted Jesus as Messiah? Not just Paul, but probably Hillel, then Nicodemus, Joseph, the scribe not far from the kingdom, and Gamaliel are known, and there are indications of many others in the movement. The siege of Jerusalem (from which the Christians escaped) was the point from which Pharisaism consolidated without Jesus, before which it had remained an open question. And when it was open, some Pharisees supported and some rejected, just as you note. The exact circumstance is in Acts 8:1-3, where Saul has just officiated at Stephen's "execution" and zealously persecuted other Christians in Jerusalem with the support of those who had Stephen persecuted (this was about 36, with the stronger leadership of James coming quite later, more like 45). The other narratives of Acts 8 indicate results of the dispersion before focusing back on Saul's reaction to his Jerusalem work being so well-supported, namely his zeal to go to Damascus; that literary decision is justified because that trip led to a lot of consequence for the whole and needed to be dealt with fully and separately from the Acts 8 narratives. So I don't see anything problematic, and I do see a little bit of potential anachronism between Saul and James.
Anyway, I'm glad we're all crossing online tonight, I respect your opinion, which is why my other comment asks how you like to work together when we have divergent opinions.
In my last deep dive with u/InevitableDot I left the question hanging, "Do you want to live forever this time, or cease to exist? Why or why not?" Dot obviously has some strong experiences, like all of us, wants to escape the matrix, and rejects the making up of stories, but also doesn't indicate having the clearest method for evaluating what is nonstory.
You see what I mean, you have already judged me. First you claimed I was an atheist, now I'm antichrist.
Jesus mission is that of spiritual liberation, yet you have no idea what he taught. You claim to know the Bible is the word of God, yet you fail to understand the reality. All the Bibles, every single one out there today require translation. Every single word you've read in the Bible is a translation. And every translation is an interpretation. And many are mistranslations & misinterpretations. Some could not have been avoided, but most were deliberate.
The original Christian understanding was very different before its appropriation and distortion by the Evil Empire (Rome). You say you are "a follower of the Way of Jesus Christ", but let me ask you something... what if Paul took Jesus's message of spiritual autonomy and reconstructed it as a message of spiritual submission? Jesus says “listen to my words”, Paul says “believe me of who Jesus is”. This change may seem small at first, but in reality it changes everything.
I haven't judged you, I'm trying to talk to you and I have a habit of taking things literal, when you say opposite I think 'anti', when you say Paul/Saul is a Jew I think 'but he isn't', I'm sorry that it put us on the wrong footing. I think you may be assuming some things about me here, I am a follower of the Way of Jesus Christ in it's original meaning and I understand well the spiritual side of that relationship and even the cultural.
Paul pointed to Christ, not himself as final authority. Perhaps you are reading it wrong? It has all been translated and retranslated but God protects His Truth and it is a living world that we need not read alone.
Hey Dot, we've had quite a few here who are leery of Paul and who prefer the gnostic corpus. There are also a few of us who follow Christ as he's revealed (including through the Bible) who have very similar and predictable takes, you might call us trads but every one of us is unique and none strike me as straitlaced here. The best way for these two groups to get to talk IMHO is to continue working out areas of agreement.
u/Thisisnotanexit isn't making accusations, she just really likes Paul and is seeking out what you do believe after your strong statements of not believing Paul. I repeated a question to you in a separate ping, that's a fine place to pick things up again. Or if you want to continue on this track, I can tell you TINAE and I are happy to learn about your positive experience of Jesus but somehow things started off on your negative experience of Paul instead. So it's good to know that you do have a system other than just "modern Christianity is distorted". I'm all for primitive, original Christianity, and can sound very gnostic, but there doesn't seem to be much there that isn't compatible with the stuff added on later. If you can indicate how we can know historical facts about folks like Paul and Jesus, so that we use the same objective methods and come to the same facts, then that helps us determine what to do with those facts.
i don't have a negative experience of Paul. But, I do have a lot of questions. And, IMO, there are many contradictions in the Bible when it comes to Paul... if you read carefully. To me Paul is nothing more than an intelligence asset working on behalf of Roman imperial interests to neutralize the most dangerous threat the empire had ever faced, Jewish fanaticism.
Let me give you an example, Paul decides to go to Damascus to destroy the Jesus movement there. But on the road to Damascus, something extraordinary happens. He sees a blinding light. He hears the voice of Jesus saying, "Paul, Paul, why are you persecuting me and my people?" And at this moment, Paul has what we now call a Damascus moment, a sudden conversion, a complete reversal of belief. And Paul at this point becomes a fanatical follower of Jesus, even though he never met Jesus in life and never met any of Jesus's original disciples. This is extremely weird, but he becomes convinced that he understands Jesus's message better than anyone. And he decides he's going to spread this message to everyone throughout the Roman Empire. So what does Paul do? He starts going to synagogues around the empire telling Jews that Jesus is the Messiah. And he begins to build the structure and organization that will become Christianity. Now, at this point, they're not called Christians. They're still Jews. And the Jesus movement is considered a branch of Judaism. But Paul introduces several radical innovations. Everything I just described to you to me seems like taken right out of a CIA or Mossad manual. None of it makes any sense to me.
I'm all for primitive, original Christianity, and can sound very gnostic
I don't sound Gnostic to me, you sound like someone who has one foot in the OT and the other in the NT. Someone who believes Jesus was sent by Yahweh to save a world which doesn't want to be saved.
I figured that much already. I'm just not sure why you want to have a religious conversation with me. I strongly suspect your "way of Jesus" and mine are not only different, but exactly opposite.
I started talking to you because you were spreading falsehoods about Paul who is a brother in Christ.
Really? name one thing I said that is a falsehood or a lie?
Maybe because I have doubts about the existence of a historical Paul. But, what if my doubts are founded? Who was Paul and where did he come from? We actually know very little about the early life of Paul, which itself is suspicious for someone so important. What we do know is that he's from a place called Tarsus, which is part of the Jewish diaspora in what is now modern Turkey. He himself was Jewish by ancestry. But crucially, he was a Roman citizen. And this is extremely rare for a Jewish person. You could only become a Roman citizen in three ways. First, you could be born to citizen parents, which is probably Paul's situation. He tells us in the Bible, I was born a Roman citizen. Therefore, my parents were citizens. This means his family was very wealthy and part of the Roman elite. Second, you could earn citizenship by serving in the Roman military for 20 years. Third, you could be granted citizenship by the emperor as a reward for exceptional service to the state. So, it's very hard to be a Roman citizen. Only a small percentage of people in empire had citizenship. But Paul was a citizen which gave him enormous privileges. He could appeal directly to the emperor. Local authorities had to treat him with respect.
Paul converted and became a Pharisee. Now, Pharisees were Jewish religious teachers who would eventually evolve into rabbis. And as a Pharisee, Paul was apparently very fanatical. We know that converts often become more extreme than people born into a tradition. And as a Pharisee, Paul was supposedly tasked with destroying the Jesus movement because it was heresy. Jesus claimed to be the Messiah, but according to the Pharisees, he wasn't. Therefore, his followers were spreading false teachings. But wait, this makes no sense. After Jesus death James the Just and the followers of Jesus were in Jerusalem and they were being protected and honored by the Pharisees. So why would the Pharisees send Paul to destroy the movement they were protecting in their own city? This is a major contradiction that no one has adequately explained, in my opinion. And I'm allowed to have my own opinion, is that right?
I'm saying Paul was changed from the pharisee known as Saul, that is the power of Jesus. The other apostles were suspicious too and that got sorted.
How do we even know Robert Frost wrote that poem? We weren't there..
(There are processes in place)
You can have all the opinions you'd like but when you display them as fact you take it to a different level where I'm able to do the same because I trust the Lord in what He says and wrote as absolute Truth.
I just replied to someone else who apparently knows you, SwampRangers. I'm just going to copy & paste my reply here. maybe you understand better by reservations when it comes to Paul.
IMO, there are many contradictions in the Bible when it comes to Paul... if you read carefully. To me Paul is nothing more than an intelligence asset working on behalf of Roman imperial interests to neutralize the most dangerous threat the empire had ever faced, Jewish fanaticism.
Let me give you an example, Paul decides to go to Damascus to destroy the Jesus movement there. But on the road to Damascus, something extraordinary happens. He sees a blinding light. He hears the voice of Jesus saying, "Paul, Paul, why are you persecuting me and my people?" And at this moment, Paul has what we now call a Damascus moment, a sudden conversion, a complete reversal of belief. And Paul at this point becomes a fanatical follower of Jesus, even though he never met Jesus in life and never met any of Jesus's original disciples. This is extremely weird, but he becomes convinced that he understands Jesus's message better than anyone. And he decides he's going to spread this message to everyone throughout the Roman Empire. So what does Paul do? He starts going to synagogues around the empire telling Jews that Jesus is the Messiah. And he begins to build the structure and organization that will become Christianity. Now, at this point, they're not called Christians. They're still Jews. And the Jesus movement is considered a branch of Judaism. But Paul introduces several radical innovations. None of it makes any sense to me.
The first major innovation is Paul's teaching that Jesus is the Messiah and that through faith in Jesus, you will achieve salvation. This is very different from what Jesus himself taught. Jesus taught that it's through good works, through compassion, through love, through helping others that you achieve spiritual liberation. But Paul teaches good works don't matter. What matters is belief. Faith in Jesus as savior. If you believe, then you are saved. If you don't believe, then you are damned. No matter how good a person you are. Think about how radical this shift is. Jesus taught that everyone has the divine spark within them and through right action through cultivating that spark you achieve enlightenment, salvation, liberation. Paul is saying forget all that just believe this specific claim that Jesus is the son of God who died for your sins and you're saved. It's transactional. It's about belief, not about inner transformation.
FYI SwampRangers is the owner of c/Porno c/Yahweh and c/Satanism
He's aligned with TINAE and their goal is to control the narrative. Do not expect them to listen or bend in any way.
I have no expectation. What does TINAE stand for?
How can one or two control the narrative if everyone has equal right to speak, Joe?
Is some speech better at controlling narratives than other speech? If so, why wouldn't we all have equal ability to use better speech? If not, how could contributions control narrative when they are nothing but speech?
What is the "narrative" you refer to anyway? Do you mean the tenor of the collective message of all contributions here as received by the readers' minds? How could anyone control that any more so than anyone else?
Perhaps you're speaking of rules? But in the absence of active moderation everyone judges the rules for themselves and they are effectively only an honor code, and rules are about behavior and not narrative; do you perhaps mean that by our desiring enforcement of rules there will be some change as if rulebreakers contribute to narrative in a way that would be harmful to enforce against? That would be an odd conclusion, that the violation of communally selected rules is somehow a benefit to the narrative. You are truly mystifying.
Oh, and was there something you wanted me to listen to or to bend about? Whatever you like, according to only one rule, that I don't bend the good conscience given to me.
Why do you lay stress on Paul "converting" when people who are Jewish by ancestry didn't need to convert? (Becoming a Pharisee wasn't a conversion, it was essentially a handshake and a promise.)
Are you familiar with the many Pharisees who accepted Jesus as Messiah? Not just Paul, but probably Hillel, then Nicodemus, Joseph, the scribe not far from the kingdom, and Gamaliel are known, and there are indications of many others in the movement. The siege of Jerusalem (from which the Christians escaped) was the point from which Pharisaism consolidated without Jesus, before which it had remained an open question. And when it was open, some Pharisees supported and some rejected, just as you note. The exact circumstance is in Acts 8:1-3, where Saul has just officiated at Stephen's "execution" and zealously persecuted other Christians in Jerusalem with the support of those who had Stephen persecuted (this was about 36, with the stronger leadership of James coming quite later, more like 45). The other narratives of Acts 8 indicate results of the dispersion before focusing back on Saul's reaction to his Jerusalem work being so well-supported, namely his zeal to go to Damascus; that literary decision is justified because that trip led to a lot of consequence for the whole and needed to be dealt with fully and separately from the Acts 8 narratives. So I don't see anything problematic, and I do see a little bit of potential anachronism between Saul and James.
Anyway, I'm glad we're all crossing online tonight, I respect your opinion, which is why my other comment asks how you like to work together when we have divergent opinions.
In my last deep dive with u/InevitableDot I left the question hanging, "Do you want to live forever this time, or cease to exist? Why or why not?" Dot obviously has some strong experiences, like all of us, wants to escape the matrix, and rejects the making up of stories, but also doesn't indicate having the clearest method for evaluating what is nonstory.
Also the opposite of Christ is antiChrist
You see what I mean, you have already judged me. First you claimed I was an atheist, now I'm antichrist.
Jesus mission is that of spiritual liberation, yet you have no idea what he taught. You claim to know the Bible is the word of God, yet you fail to understand the reality. All the Bibles, every single one out there today require translation. Every single word you've read in the Bible is a translation. And every translation is an interpretation. And many are mistranslations & misinterpretations. Some could not have been avoided, but most were deliberate.
The original Christian understanding was very different before its appropriation and distortion by the Evil Empire (Rome). You say you are "a follower of the Way of Jesus Christ", but let me ask you something... what if Paul took Jesus's message of spiritual autonomy and reconstructed it as a message of spiritual submission? Jesus says “listen to my words”, Paul says “believe me of who Jesus is”. This change may seem small at first, but in reality it changes everything.
I haven't judged you, I'm trying to talk to you and I have a habit of taking things literal, when you say opposite I think 'anti', when you say Paul/Saul is a Jew I think 'but he isn't', I'm sorry that it put us on the wrong footing. I think you may be assuming some things about me here, I am a follower of the Way of Jesus Christ in it's original meaning and I understand well the spiritual side of that relationship and even the cultural.
Paul pointed to Christ, not himself as final authority. Perhaps you are reading it wrong? It has all been translated and retranslated but God protects His Truth and it is a living world that we need not read alone.
Funny how all these newcomers find you out for what you really are.
Hey Dot, we've had quite a few here who are leery of Paul and who prefer the gnostic corpus. There are also a few of us who follow Christ as he's revealed (including through the Bible) who have very similar and predictable takes, you might call us trads but every one of us is unique and none strike me as straitlaced here. The best way for these two groups to get to talk IMHO is to continue working out areas of agreement.
u/Thisisnotanexit isn't making accusations, she just really likes Paul and is seeking out what you do believe after your strong statements of not believing Paul. I repeated a question to you in a separate ping, that's a fine place to pick things up again. Or if you want to continue on this track, I can tell you TINAE and I are happy to learn about your positive experience of Jesus but somehow things started off on your negative experience of Paul instead. So it's good to know that you do have a system other than just "modern Christianity is distorted". I'm all for primitive, original Christianity, and can sound very gnostic, but there doesn't seem to be much there that isn't compatible with the stuff added on later. If you can indicate how we can know historical facts about folks like Paul and Jesus, so that we use the same objective methods and come to the same facts, then that helps us determine what to do with those facts.
i don't have a negative experience of Paul. But, I do have a lot of questions. And, IMO, there are many contradictions in the Bible when it comes to Paul... if you read carefully. To me Paul is nothing more than an intelligence asset working on behalf of Roman imperial interests to neutralize the most dangerous threat the empire had ever faced, Jewish fanaticism.
Let me give you an example, Paul decides to go to Damascus to destroy the Jesus movement there. But on the road to Damascus, something extraordinary happens. He sees a blinding light. He hears the voice of Jesus saying, "Paul, Paul, why are you persecuting me and my people?" And at this moment, Paul has what we now call a Damascus moment, a sudden conversion, a complete reversal of belief. And Paul at this point becomes a fanatical follower of Jesus, even though he never met Jesus in life and never met any of Jesus's original disciples. This is extremely weird, but he becomes convinced that he understands Jesus's message better than anyone. And he decides he's going to spread this message to everyone throughout the Roman Empire. So what does Paul do? He starts going to synagogues around the empire telling Jews that Jesus is the Messiah. And he begins to build the structure and organization that will become Christianity. Now, at this point, they're not called Christians. They're still Jews. And the Jesus movement is considered a branch of Judaism. But Paul introduces several radical innovations. Everything I just described to you to me seems like taken right out of a CIA or Mossad manual. None of it makes any sense to me.
I don't sound Gnostic to me, you sound like someone who has one foot in the OT and the other in the NT. Someone who believes Jesus was sent by Yahweh to save a world which doesn't want to be saved.