Do Christians ever entertain the possibility that Paul and others claimed Jesus said things which he did not ?

Answer 1

No I do not. Do you think soldiers and people following Genghis Khan made of lies about his strength and deadly nature? Most people will believe the stories of ancient leaders like this due to "history" but will fail to believe anything that is written in the Bible. It is the same thing.

Answer 2

It's not a possibility, it's an absolute truth, Paul's Christianity and Jesus' Christianity are completely different.

Answer 3

I love Paul but I have a little problem with him.
Paul says all you need to be saved is to Believe that God rose from the dead...Jesus never said this. His message was to love God and most of all, Love each other.
Otherwise, Paul is ok.

Answer 4

Yes. Most of what was written in those days was written with an agenda. Or is lost in time or translation. It would be interesting to know what Jesus would think about all the things He is supposed to have said and done.

And even more interesting to know what He would think about what is said and done in His name.

Answer 5

If you were a historian trying to research the live and words of an individual, there are four different sources that you would normally want to consult, assuming that there are no documents left by the person himself...

First, you would want to look for an account kept by someone who was an intimate friend or associate of the person. It should be written close to the times of the actual events, and include little commentary or interpretation.

Second, you would want to look for accounts from "outsides". What did the general public thinks, what did the person allow them to see, and how was he perceived by the public.

Third, you would want an account written by someone who was intimate with the person, but who has several decades to reflect on the person's live, to see its affect on those around him, and to be able to give a mature, historical perspective of his life.

Finally, you would want to examine what other historians and biographers had written about, and any accounts from witnesses that they have preserved.

Presented within the scripture are four different accounts of Jesus. In Matthew, you have an intimate friend writing within a short period of the events. He gives us the private view of Jesus. In Mark, you have an outsider, someone who followed the events are a slight distance, who gives us the public view of Jesus. In Luke you have an historian, who did not know Jesus personally, but rather preserves from us the account of numerous eye witnesses. And in John, you have the reflections of an intimate friend who after a lifetime of living and preaching the words of Jesus, seeing their affect and understanding their meaning, is able to give us the historical perspective of his life.

Are their words reliable? All four authors agree with each other, with about 92% of what Mark tells us being retold by Matthew and Luke. So they all apparently were familiar with the same teachings and words having been spoken by Jesus.

How early were the words recorded? Scholars are in agreement that Paul's earliest letters were authored by him between 48 and 56 AD. (The resurrection of Jesus having happened around 30 AD.) Within these writings are over two dozen phrases found in the teachings of Jesus in the gospels (including two length quotes), all recorded 18-26 years after the time of Jesus - a very short time for "false" teachings to have developed.

When you examines the historical evidence found in the writings of Paul and the gospels, it is evident that they are a reliable record of the words of Jesus.

Answer 6

Sure.

In my opinion, the four gospels show at least a moderate amount of consistency ... if not in words, than in ideas. They all support that Jesus promoted love and forgiveness.

Paul's letters ... on the other hand ... well, I just think that he was pushing a little of his own agenda. I'm not saying that NOTHING he said had merit, but I think the message he taught was a little slanted.

Answer 7

Well dewcoons had an EXCELLENT answer, but I think there is one more thing to point out, what St. Paul's preaching got him. You need to examine St. Paul's biography.

St. Paul starts off as Saul of Tarsus, a wealthy, influental, and learned Jew. He has it all. Money, postion, he comes from a good family, and he believes that he has assured himself of salvation through the Law. He is God's avenger on these apostiate Christians....

Then he has his encounter on the road to Damascus. He's blind, he goes to the Christian community and asks not just to be taken in but to join... the very community he had been a leader in persecuting. (This is a bit like a leader of the KKK going to the NAACP and asking to be forgiven and be admitted to membership.)

Paul then spends the rest of his life in poverty, bouncing around the Eastern Med, supporting himself as a wandering tentmaker (IIRC), depending on the kindness of strangers for shelter and food, facing sucess in his preaching but also a lot of rejection and hostility too, getting shipwrecked, abused, and bouncing in and out of jail. Finally he winds up getting taken to Rome and executed for his trouble.

He looses everything he had when started out to Damascus, his money, his position, his family and friends, his freedom, and finally his life.

So I think we can pretty much assume that St. Paul was sincere in what he was doing. These are not the actions of someone who was in it for the power or the money. Mohammed (for example) winds up his preaching career as the absolute ruler of a theocratic state, with several wives, and though he didn't have vast wealth he had more power than any leader alive today (except perhaps Kim Ill Sung of North Korea), and more wives than Hugh Heffner.

If St. Paul had wound up like Mohammed, (or L. Ron Hubbard) where his preaching got him power, money, and babes... then I would say you had every reason to be very cynical about his preaching... there would be obvious motives for them to lie and a rational person would have to suspect that they were lying.

St. Paul was just the opposite. His preaching didn't GET him anything, instead it COST him everything. (Not unlike St. Francis of Assisi, or Buddah)

So it is pretty clear that whatever Paul said was what Paul sincerely believed.

Now you may not believe that Paul had a vision on the road to Damascus... but it is pretty darn clear that Paul sincerely believed he did... believed it enough he gave up everything for it.

More importantly the other Christians believed it too. People like Peter, and the other apostiles. People who had lived, walked, eaten, and talked with Jesus for years. People who had seen Jesus after he came back from the dead. People who also lost everything they had in order to preach the Gospel. They all wound up as martyrs too.

So we know St. Paul was sincere, and we know that St. Peter was sincere, and we know that St. Peter believed St. Paul... they disagreed on things but St. Peter never came out and said "Paul is a liar." Instead they treated each other as peers.

So given that, it simply does not make sense for why they would make up anything about Jesus or what he said. Why on Earth would someone make up and stick to a story that was going to cost them everything they had, and get them killed by the Romans in a very ugly fashion?

The only LOGICAL explanation is that it is all true.

Answer 8

Why would they bother to make up stories about Jesus if he was not the Son of God? In order to make people thousands of years later believe in a false God even though they would never be alive to see it? No. They believed that Jesus was the Son of God and they were writing at His command. They would not have lied about their Lord.

Answer 9

Why? isn`t it written that if all the things Jesus said and did were recorded the whole world could not contain the books!

Answer 10

No, we don't. But we have considered that they did not tell everything He said or did.