Intriguing exercise
 

To test out something I came across last night, I read, in chronological order, the epistles of St. Paul. It's true, none of those letters show any acquaintance with the teachings of Jesus, his travels, his history or his parables. Jesus appears as a dying and resurrecting god with the exception of the last supper which is obviously an existing ritual when Paul writes about it. It seems clear that Paul must not have read any of the materials that ended up in the gospels. Why didn't I figure this out decades ago? I think I must have been misled by the canonical order.

Give it a try someone, it's an enlightening exercise. Whoever the historical Jesus was, his life and teachings seem completely irrelevant to St. Paul. What matter is his death and resurrection. Not much else except the last supper.

Makes a person wonder why the gospels were written if all the churches Paul started got by without them.

Read them again. :)

If he reads them again CLK man, he'll come to the same conclusion. Paul was writing well before the fairy tales about Jesus were concocted to make him fit the old testament prophesies. You should read them and back up your reading with some research about when the individual gospels were written and by whom. There is a clear progression from the earliest to the latest. He goes from an essentially human historical figure to a magical son of God who went around performing parlor tricks in the later gospels. Your belief in the christ should not be challenged by such a study. Rather, you might come to see him as a real, human, man of god whose essential goodness has been clouded by centuries of childish magical thinking.

It is somewhat of a puzzle. Paul was very successful creating a non-Jewish version of Christianity with no gospels, no miracles, not teachings, no history, just the resurrected lord. So why did the Gospels come about? Were they written by authors with different views than Paul's as an alternative? Were they written to create a figure consistent with Paul's risen Lord? At one time in my life I gave a fair amount of attention to the question of 'Who was the historical Jesus? When I was thinking about that, it never crossed my mind that the religion had begun and expanded with no historical Jesus at all. That expansion does make sense if it is based on a mystical experience of the risen Christ, but it doesn't explain why the Jesus of the gospels needed to be created? Just for background effect?

It probably reinforces Dennis McDonald's argument that the earliest gospel (Mark) was written on the model of an Homeric epic, following the life of the hero. If the person who created the religion had no knowledge of the person who had died and resurrected to save them, something would need to be developed to reinforce the salvation story.

I can't even imagine being bored enough to do that. ;)

Bishop Spong feels that the writers of the gospels felt a need to create an image of Jesus that ties him closely to not only the OT prophesies but to the Jewish liturgy of the day. He sees this becoming more and more important chronologically thru the canon. In much the same way that later christian missionaries were happy to overlay their religious calendar onto the existing holy days of their proselytes, it's no coincidence that the key moment's in Jesus' life follow the Jewish liturgical calendar closely.

Which reinforces the idea that they were written in another branch of the early religion to reinforce their own 'branding' since Paul is pretty clearly not in favor of Christianity as a branch of Judaism. The reason is pretty clear in his letters--he doesn't think his converts need to get circumcised. His conversion rate would have dropped significantly or switched mainly to females if that had been a requirement.

One of my humanities professors back in college made a compelling case that Paul was the founder of modern capitalism. Paul was not interested in the teachings of Christ, he was interested in selling a product. He was the founder of salesmanship, and the first pioneer of advertising. Selling his product successfully kept him financially secure and popular, and gave him more and more power. His letters were nothing more than his sales brochures. And look at what he built - in modern times, he would have been known as a "multi-level marketer", he sold Christianity like Amway - now that you're completely sold on my product, you need to be a salesman for it too. At it's heart, modern Christian evangelicalism is simply an Amway game.

I remember reading in one of Spong's books that there were two power centers in early Christianity, a Jewish movement based in Jerusalem that was headed up by Jesus's brother James, and the Gentiles movement headed up by Paul in Damascus. Perhaps the inclusion of both faction's writings were an attempt to unify the faith at the time, something Constantine was said to be very concerned about. It happened two centuries after Paul was dead and gone IIRC.

He definitely was the model religious entrepeneur. A Jewish savior seems unlikely to have had much appeal in the far flung reaches of the Roman empire, so ignoring Jesus' Jewishness was a shrewd move, even if he knew of it. So that makes me think that the whole 'Son of Man' theme in the gospel of Mark, may be an attempt to construct a hero who is not a Jewish messiah but a savior for the human race instead of just for Jews. This would then give need for the writing of more Jewish gospels to support the Christianity-as-a-sect-of-Judaism group.

Just re-read Mark. It clearly is a gentile/anti-Jewish gospel. It starts out with John the Baptist the Jewish pre-cursor to Jesus who gets killed halfway thru. Jesus first miracle is in the synagogue in Capernaum where a demon cries out that Jesus is come to destroy them. The next story, he violates the Sabbath rules. Then there's a story about a prophet not being accepted in his home town. Then the Pharisees get on Jesus and his disciples case for not following Jewish rules. Jesus travels to Jerusalem where he is rejected, (notice Jesus was not born in Bethlehem in this gospel--but in Nazareth, far further north) and says that the temple will be torn down. It has the apocalytpical message of Jesus returning to rule the whole world and his death occurs because the chief priests do not want him to be king of the jews. After his resurrection, Jesus does not appear in Jerusalem but in Galilee, again to the north. It ends with Jesus saying go in all the world to preach the gospel.
It is clearly a text written to reinforce Paul's efforts to take this Jewish sect into the larger Roman empire as a non-jewish religion with Jesus as the god who rules the whole world.

In other words, Paul understood "market share". Kraft wouldn't be selling a lot of macaroni and cheese if they only sold it to Italians, now, would they?