"Saint Saul", the Virgin Birth, Paul and superstition

[havemercy]

In my World Religions class we’ve just moved from Judaism to Christianity and I’ve been a rather active participant in discussions pertaining to both.

Today curious prospects were espoused by my teacher. I’ve yet to form a meaningful opinion about these ideas. He mentioned the book Saint Saul by Donald Harman Akenson and how he and others (scholars? historians? amateurs?) have taken a “fine-toothed comb” to Paul’s epistles and have come to view St. Paul as one who “wasn’t too fond of superstition”, namely “the Virgin Birth”, “likening it to ‘Romanesque’ fantasies”.

Have any of you read this book, and/or does anyone have any experience with such allegations that perhaps but heads with Sacred Tradition? Comments, criticisms, and/or railing speech, anyone?

Pax vobiscum,

 

[Lazerlike42]

I don’t know much about it, but from the little I have been able to garner in a quick search, Akenson seems to simply bring up the tired old arguement that Paul changed a simple teacher into God in his writings, an arguement that has been shown to be empty countless times.

 

[Lazerlike42]

“The main weakness in the argument is his assumption that the events of 66-70 CE were cataclysmic for formative Christianity. His whole project rests on the assumption—and it is an assumption; he does not really try to demonstrate it— that the war with Rome and its aftermath produced such an upheaval in the development of Christianity that post-70 CE sources are opaque to the pre-70 state of affairs. Of course, the significance of these events for Judaism is not to be downplayed (though even here it is less true for diaspora Judaism, which demonstrated little enthusiasm for the war and whose self-understanding did not rest in any fundamental way on the existence of the temple). But in the case of Jewish Christianity, the assumption is open to serious objection. In fact, Paul himself represents a highly pertinent counter-example. For Paul and other first-generation Christians, it was the experience of the risen Jesus (1 Corinthians 15:8; Galatians 1:15-16) and the resultant beliefs about the significance of Jesus in the divine scheme of things, that was the “equivalent of a nuclear blast” (cf. p. 8), removing the temple from the centre of their world and generating of a new and distinct form of Judaism. Precisely for this reason, pre-war Christianity would not have been effected in any cataclysmic way by the events of 70 CE. Of course, this “nuclear blast” creates its own problems for those who want to peer behind it to catch glimpses of the pre-Easter Jesus; but even so Paul provides us with no special advantage over the Gospels. In the end, then, while Akenson’s St. Saul is highly entertaining, it is Paul himself who undermines its argument.”

• mcmaster.ca/mjtm/4-r1.htm