Amusingly, your entire comment pegs you as a child. So in practically two sentences you’ve hosed any possible reputation as reliable that you could have had. We call that an “own goal.” Your opinions clearly are neither competent nor mature.

Citation: Paul as Herodian
Paper given at Society of Biblical Literature conference in 1984; published in Journal of Higher Criticism, Vol. 3, Spring 1996, pp. 110-122.

You are an idiot. That’s why no one who follows biblical scholarship respects you.

On the topic of Paul, isn’t the first question we should all ask is who was Paul? Was he a Jew? But not born in Judah? Or a Roman? Or a Pharisee? Or a Christian?

Of course. And we have to rely on his letters, and evaluate what they say critically; no other sources are reliable or trustworthy. The best scholars of Paul (e.g. Lüdemann, Segal) follow this procedure.

His writings contradict all of these descriptions.

No, they well establish he was a Pharisaic Diaspora Jew (he never or rarely went to Judea until after his conversion), and probably a Roman citizen (he never says so; but his name is a Roman praenomen, and unlikely to have been a name he’d claim without the trinominal citizenship). They also establish he rebelled against his Pharisaic sect when he converted (there isn’t any discernible reason for him to lie about that). We cannot tell though whether he had been a Hillelite (a liberal Pharisee; whose doctrines the Gospels ignorantly depict Jesus preaching “against” the Pharisees, demonstrating they were not well informed about Pharisaic doctrine) or a Shammaite (a conservative Pharisee; disillusion with which could psychologically explain a rebellion into a liberal radical sect).

All of these descriptions are also contradictory to the point of conflict.

They do not. There were tons of Jews who were Roman citizens, never or rarely went to Judea, sampled different sects before settling on one or never settling on one, and who even converted from one sect to another later on. In fact most Jews in the Roman Empire did not live in Judea. And ditching conservative sects for radical ones was common enough to practically define many entrants in the most Christianity-like sects (Essenes; Qumran). And Christianity was at that time a sect of Judaism, not some distinct religion. It might even have been classified by outsiders as one of the nine or so sub-sects of Essenes (it’s similar enough to have been seen that way even if that wasn’t an accurate representation of its ideological lineage).

I fail to see how educated Pharisee could become a member of small Jewish sect. Oil and water. They just don’t mix.

That’s actually credible. How many hard core conservative Christians have rebelled into liberal radicalism? It’s a common enough phenomenon to be repeatedly documented. Indeed, even its statistical rareness fits type: there is only one known Paul in his day. Exactly as this explanation would predict.

And what happened to Paul? Acts leaves him in Rome under house arrest waiting for and Audience with Nero in the mid 60s.

There is no way we could expect to know. As dead men don’t write letters, wherever he died, we won’t have an account of it. Our only likely contemporary source (1 Clement) says he died in Spain, without further details. Later legends have him executed by Nero in Rome, but none of those are plausible, and Clement is a more credible source and contradicts that. Acts is wholly unreliable and untrustworthy, and its closing account bears no historical plausibility. As we know Acts frequently fabricates and contradicts Paul’s own accounts to suit its own propagandistic narrative, it’s of no use here.

I like to surmise that during his Audience with Nero, knowing that his chances of survival were low, he did as Josephus did with Vespasian and quickly changed his tune. Perhaps his quick mind and intelligence allowed him to pivot and offer Nero assistance with his regional knowledge to help the Romans with the Jewish uprising happening at about that time?

You’re buying into 2nd century Christian propaganda here. Fact is, there is no reason Nero would even be prosecuting Paul. That’s why that story is almost certainly bogus. At that time Paul was protected by treaty: Jews had the right of religious freedom, and were only subject in religious disputes to their own courts. Romans had no interest at all in these disputes and at that time always let Christians go (even Acts depicts this happening over and over again, whereas its trial account explaining Paul being sent to Rome makes no sense from a Roman legal perspective, as at no point is he said to have broken any Roman law).

It was only after the destruction of Judea that that treaty was nullified and Jewish radicals could end up prosecuted for illegal assembly (as we see Pliny the Younger doing; who notably has no notion even that Christians are Jews, which illustrates how far the circumstances had changed from Paul’s day). Luke-Acts looks like someone writing in that context, wholly unaware of how things were entirely different in the time of Paul.

Meanwhile, Paul was a Diaspora Jew. He would have little use as an informant on Judean affairs. And yet he could have been one without renouncing his Christian sectarian allegiance (which would have been a meaningless distinction to Romans at the time; they cared little for sectarian distinctions among the Jews), so your scenario makes no sense even on that point. Josephus did not renounce his sect when he turned coat; he remained a Pharisaic Jew. And Christians were already anti-war, so Paul wouldn’t even be betraying anyone he was aligned with (unlike Josephus, who was an actual general warring against Rome).

Beyond that, speculation is idle. Possibly never gets you to probably.

I recently read Jesus from Outer Space. Great read. Many thanks.

On the topic of Paul, isn’t the first question we should all ask is who was Paul?

Was he a Jew? But not born in Judah? Or a Roman? Or a Pharisee? Or a Christian?

His writings contradict all of these descriptions.

All of these descriptions are also contradictory to the point of conflict. I fail to see how educated Pharisee could become a member of small Jewish sect. Oil and water. They just don’t mix.

And what happened to Paul? Acts leaves him in Rome under house arrest waiting for and Audience with Nero in the mid 60s.

I like to surmise that during his Audience with Nero, knowing that his chances of survival were low, he did as Josephus did with Vespasian and quickly changed his tune. Perhaps his quick mind and intelligence allowed him to pivot and offer Nero assistance with his regional knowledge to help the Romans with the Jewish uprising happening at about that time?

Maybe as Josephus was spared by Vespasian, Paul was also spared by being a turn coat on he fellow Jews?

I would value your intellectual response

kind regards

Owen

I discuss this observation already in On the Historicity of Jesus, chapter 4, Element 15.

I don’t know what relevance that has to the article you are commenting on.

https://neuro.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.neuropsych.11090214

Alas, that subject doesn’t interest me enough to find itself high enough on my already long list of potential projects for it to be likely something I’d do in my remaining lifetime. But I’ll add it to the list.

That isn’t actually “clear.” Nothing in Paul’s letters describes epilepsy or seizures. And nothing in Acts is credible (it’s made up, often directly to contradict Paul and the truth), so we can’t use it for symptomology.

That is only a hypothesis that “could” explain what other data there is; but many other hypotheses explain all that same data equally well. So we can’t claim to know here.

However, all those alternative hypotheses do lead to the same conclusion as yours: whether Paul is schizotypal, a practiced hallucinator, an epileptic, a mystic who thinks ordinary dreams are real experiences, or a grifter pretending to be any of these, in every case we have someone whose usual behavior is often detached from reality and fantasy-prone, so one has to take that into account. But this rarely means they are making everything up. Most things such people say will reflect reality. You need to adduce a particular reason why it wouldn’t be, on a case by case basis. And your explanatory model, whatever it is, needs to be coherent, and in line with known science.

It is fairly clear that Paul sufferers from a fairly serious seizure disorder, likely epilepsy. But more seriously, the guy was definitely on the psychosis spectrum. Between the paranoia, visions and auditory hallucinations etc.. Knowing quite a bit about psychosis, I’ve learned you can’t really trust what someone with psychosis of some type says. A lot of it is detached from reality. Wondering why this argument isn’t used more in questioning what Pauls writings say.

I’ll leave it at that.
Cheers