[zeek]

Originally Posted by awareness

Given this obvious discrepancy or lack between "Paul's gospel," (Rom 2:16, 16:25) and the later gospels, I don't know now but, apparently Jesus had some pretty high ideals. Ideals that if lived up to would have never produced "competing" beliefs. I'm thinking of the sermon on the mount.

But, Jesus didn't transmit his teaching in written form and those who wrote about him represented a variety of views.

Doesn't this suggest that the stories grew as time went on, and weren't developed in Paul's early days and writings?

Sure. Plus they may have understood Jesus differently from the outset. That would be only natural.

If we only had Paul's earliest accounts of Jesus, we wouldn't know much about the historical Jesus. Perhaps that's because according to Paul he wasn't going by the oral tradition of the stories about Jesus ; he was going by the revealed Jesus, the one that appeared to him on the road to Damascus.

Yes, Paul also reflects an awareness of the beliefs and practices of the churches. Thus, his epistles have great historical value.

And seems Paul's revealed Jesus cared only for a few things about his historical self ; like his death, resurrection, appearances, ascension, and becoming a life giving spirit. Paul's revealed Jesus doesn't even mention his own virgin birth, his own passion account, nor his own sermon on the mount.

Paul was focused on the Christ of faith not the Jesus of history.

True, except for Luke. Luke, whoever he was, claims to be gathering material to compose his gospel. Paul's letters were passed among the churches. Surely whoever Luke was would have some copies of Paul's letters.

What makes you so sure?

Maybe the gospels don't mention the epistles of Paul because they are written from the perspective of the historical Jesus, and the historical Jesus didn't know Paul.

We don't have any writing from Jesus's perspective.

At any rate, following Jesus, early on, in the 1st century, there does seem to be different gospels. Paul warned of different gospels, even during his day. Seems, as he feared, they came along on down the line. And Christianity became poor poor.

Maybe Christianity became "poor poor", if indeed is, when it excluded some of the "different" gospels and the people who wrote them. How much richer would Christianity be if Christians hadn't burned writings they disagreed with?

Evangelical Christianity's embrace of Trump's presidency reminds me of the pattern through which the Jesus movement became Church Christianity. Like many Evangelicals today, Proto-orthodox Christians understood power as the possession of an Almighty God on high, not of the people below.

In Romans 13:1 Paul says "Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God." Thus, Pauline Christians understood the emperor to be God’s deputy on earth, upholding divine justice, not as a tyrant whose position was based on force.

Church Christianity willingly accepted imperial patronage because it had a great deal to gain from it. Christian writers like Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 260–c. 340) were quick to characterize Constantine as ‘the deputy of Christ’, and eager to insist that the alliance of church and Empire was part of God’s providential plan for the world.