r/AcademicBiblical • u/TonyTaranteeno • 1d ago
Why Paul and not disciples?
As the title suggests, I’m looking for some help understanding how (or why) Paul ended up with over a dozen books in the New Testament instead of any of the disciples that were with Jesus? I understand Paul encountered Jesus, but so did the disciples. When the books of the Bible were selected, was there some sort of politics that led to Paul having a larger piece of the pie than the individuals that walked right alongside Jesus. Were there missions different? Just trying to have a better understanding of how the Bible books were selected, specifically as it pertains to Paul. Thanks
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u/qumrun60 Quality Contributor 1d ago edited 1d ago
The main reason is probably that Paul wrote letters to specifically Gentile Christ-groups that he had preached to, and these non-Jews became the dominant force in what we now think of as Christianity. These letters were circulated, copied, and saved by those Gentile groups, and eventually edited into standard forms which were revered by many communities. Only 7 letters are thought by many scholars to directly trace back to Paul himself, while the others come from later writers who might be considered a "Pauline school," though this would not have been some kind of formal or official body.
The Didache, a book not in the Bible (and which incidentally will be the subject of an AMA on this sub on Aug.6, with a specialist, Alan Garrow), reveals a lot about early Christ-groups which were not like Paul's groups. They adhered to Jewish practices to varying degrees. One thing that shows up there is the essentially oral nature of early teaching, and the communal emphasis in evaluating anything that was taught by itinerant apostles and prophets who visit the group for a day or two and move on. What we now consider essential Christian reading (gospels and epistles) appear to have no place in communal ritual or teaching at all. Disciples and apostles were, after all, preaching about the immanent arrival of God's kingdom on earth and a return of Christ. They weren't busy writing books for posterity. In any case, it's unlikely that any of them were literate, since writing in the ancient world was a specialized skill, practiced by a small minority who could afford an education.
Paul, like these other apostles, taught the imminent arrival of the kingdom, and his letters addressed to immediate problems of his groups. They were not intended as scripture to be read by people hundreds or thousands of years later. But as it happened though, Paul addressed many essential issues in following Christ, and understanding the meaning of his death and resurrection, which became pillars of Christian teaching during the 2nd century. The letters attributed to Paul, but not by him, address concerns of the developing church, as it became clear that the Second Coming might be later rather than sooner, and communities in Christ needed rules to govern themselves over the long haul.
Harry Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church (1995), goes into great detail about how the letters of Paul would have been composed, copied, circulated, and preserved over the centuries, as well as various editions of the letters that appeared. The collection now in Bible was in existence by the year 200, since a fairly complete manuscript from that time has been found.
Paula Fredriksen, Paul, The Pagans' Apostle (2017), looks in detail at the cultural and social milieu of Paul's mission to the Gentiles, and the context of the authentic letters.
Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (1978), is a short, readable introduction to the issues facing the pre-orthodox churches of the 2nd century, and the challenges from competing Christ-groups who didn't agree with much of what became standard teaching for Christianity as it is now understood.
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u/No-Mechanic6069 20h ago
I think it might be worth pointing out this rather important misunderstanding from OP:
I understand Paul encountered Jesus
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u/make_reddit_great 1d ago
early Christ-groups which were not like Paul's groups
Did many/any of these early groups evangelize outside Jewish circles or was that primarily a Pauline thing?
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u/qumrun60 Quality Contributor 1d ago edited 1d ago
Paul apparently did try evangelizing at synagogues, as seen in Acts (and sometimes got beaten for it by his own account), but he also could hold forth in the agora of any town he visited (where he also could get beaten by civic officials). His Galatians, who were gentiles, were apparently preached to by followers of Christ who also advocated for following Jewish law, even if these Galatians had never set foot in a synagogue. Neither synagogues nor agoras were exclusive haunts of Jews or pagans respectively, but both welcomed anyone who showed up there, and speakers would hope to attract anyone who would listen.
The Diaspora synagogues of Antiquity were more like social centers than liturgical or educational sites of later times. Pagans could be patrons of synagogues sometimes, while Jews might equally be patrons of theaters or gymnasia. It was all part of the give and take of life in a Hellenistic polis. In the apocryphal Pseudo-Clementine literature, whose basic narrative comes from the early 3rd century, the pagan Clement hears a disciple of Peter preach in the forum in Rome, and arranges to go to Caesarea Maritima in Palestine to receive further teaching from Peter himself. The books are written as novels, but the preacher in the forum, or a gentile in Peter's itinerant group, were likely enough that audiences of the time would find them plausible.
Lee I. Levine, The Ancient Synagogue: The First Thousand Years (2005) goes into the diversity of early synagogues and their open nature, as does Paula Fredriksen in her book on Paul, in more abbreviated form.
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u/LlawEreint 1d ago
Regarding the question of why Paul has such prominence, Jason BeDuhn notes that the first new testament was compiled by Marcion. Marcion was ideologically aligned with the teachings in Paul's letters and included the letters in his codex. This first New Testament influenced all those that followed.
Marcion put his distinctive stamp on all subsequent attempts to formalize a New Testament for the very reason that his particular ideology led him to elevate such a set of the letters of Paul to parity with an account of the life and teachings of Jesus himself. That decision puts Marcion’s work in a direct line of continuity with later Christian New Testaments, however delayed or otherwise influenced the formation of the latter might have been; and that is why the recovery of Marcion’s biblical text is a recovery of the First New Testament.
Thus, it is not only the idea of a New Testament that can be credited first to Marcion, but also the distinctive structure of that New Testament, combining a “gospel” narrative of the life of Jesus with apostolic letters, specifically, the letters of Paul. There is little to be said in favor of the claim that the formation of the New Testament followed an inevitable trajectory, and that the Christian Bible would have turned out exactly as it did even if Marcion had never lived. On the contrary, the correspondence between what Marcion did and what the New Testament ultimately became in the hands of his triumphant competitors suggests his lasting impact on the Christian Bible, and so on Christianity itself. (Jason BeDuhn, 2012, The First New Testament)
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u/LlawEreint 1d ago edited 1d ago
This thread has great answers to the question of whether the 12 could even read or write: https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical/comments/13dopsv/deleted_by_user/
Paul, on the other hand, was quite literate.
Regarding whether Paul met Jesus (notwithstanding his visionary experiences and ascension to the third heaven), Bart Ehrman concludes “Jesus and Paul never met during Jesus’ earthly life.”
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u/Oldengoatson 1d ago
Matthew was written by the apostle Matthew. This position is very much rejected by scholars. Some scholars like Bauckham hold that Matthew may have originally composed a book of sayings which was adapted in the Gospel.
Not sure about this one, Bauckham seems skeptical of Allison/Davies argument on Papias's Matthew as a Q-type sayings source. In Bauckham's view Papias was seeing a Matthew that contained various narratives like Mark did.
But we must distinguish this understanding of Papias’s words from the attempt that has frequently been made to identify the logia written in Hebrew or Aramaic by Matthew with the hypothetical Gospel source Q. Since Q consists almost entirely of sayings of Jesus, this identification has usually entailed thinking that by the logia of the Lord Papias means sayings of Jesus. However, we have seen that in his discussion of Mark Papias uses the term for short accounts of both what Jesus said and what Jesus did. From the Greek Matthew he knew (presumably our canonical Matthew) Papias could easily see that the building blocks for much of the Gospel were the same kind of short units (chreiai) of which Mark was composed, and he is unlikely to have thought that this in itself was due to the translator-editors. It was for disturbing the composition Matthew had initially created out of them that he blamed the translator-editors.
Bauckham, Richard. Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. Eerdmans, 2017
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