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Oligopsony comments on [Link] St. Paul: memetic engineer - Less Wrong Discussion

2 [deleted] 12 January 2013 01:21PM

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Comment author: Oligopsony 12 January 2013 08:48:23PM 2 points [-]

Pretty much everything in Acts is bullshit, there's a lot of controversy over Paul's theology, and the Gospels come after a period of considerable intellectual evolution; so I'm inherently distrustful of this sort of textual harmonization. The basic idea that Paul lowered the barriers to entry is of course solid but also frankly uninteresting (although that's a subjective judgment.)

Comment author: JQuinton 18 January 2013 10:51:28PM 2 points [-]

Basically.

Historically, most Christians ignored Paul (at least, we don't have any record of any Christians appealing to him as any sort of authority) until around the early/middle of the 2nd century, when Marcion first appealed to Paul as an authority. As it turns out -- since Marcion was a heretic -- Acts of the Apostles was written to counter Marcion and his interpretation of Paul (see Marcion and Luke-Acts.

Marcion's Bible was the first Christian Bible, and it's simple happenstance of proto-Catholics modeling their Bible off of Marcion's model (Paul-obsession, really) that Paul seems to be such an important figure.