How did Paul make money and buy food for the journeys?
There are also other mentions he was a tentmaker.
For anyone wondering
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tentmaking
> ... in which missionaries support themselves by working full-time in the marketplace with their skills and education, instead of receiving financial support from a Church.
I feel like if tent-making was such a prevalent profession, there'd be name derivatives from it
The Arabic surnames Kheyyam/Khayam/Khayami are all derived from the word for tent maker, Plachta is Polish, but more closely aligns with canvas-maker, mostly sails. And then theres Zeltman, which is German for tent man (which is ambiguous between "man who sells tents" and "man who lives in a tent")
> And then theres Zeltman, which is German for tent man (which is ambiguous between "man who sells tents" and "man who lives in a tent")
likely a bit of both!
https://www.billmounce.com/greek-dictionary/skenopoios
"some translate more generally: leather worker"
> Jefferson mashed up/cut and pasted the New Testament to remove any references to the supernatural, or miracles, as well as the divinity of Christ. His title for the book was "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth," which tells us a lot about his motivations.
Walking in Arius' footsteps ...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dnyxy8/thoma...
As to the degree that these are falling apart is debatable. They certainly don't have the strong central hierarchy and universalism that Catholic and Protestant sects have, but they seem to endure.
Without Paul, Christianity reverts to being a variety of Judaism whose leader from the hinterlands got it right about what really mattered in life, as had his predecessors [0]. But he fatally misjudged the big city's religious oligarchs — vassals to their ruthless Roman occupiers — when he relentlessly attacked them and their cozy little setup; at their behest, he was executed by the Roman overlords.
Some [1] of the leader's later followers — his posse, if you will — imagined they'd seen him. But the leader's wealthy and/or well-connected followers are strangely absent from the narrative. Perhaps they had more information about what had really happened [2].
The early postmortem appearance tales eventually mutated into a legend of a warrior-king, raised from the dead — who would return Real Soon Now, to usher in God's reign and establish Israel's rightful place in Creation [3].
Over decades, the tales percolated into Mediterranean Graeco-Roman culture — eventually mutating further still into a tale of a divine being [4] (perhaps hybridized with that culture's myths?).
Some self-cites:
[0] https://www.questioningchristian.org/2006/06/metanarratives_...
[1] https://www.questioningchristian.org/2004/10/troubling_incon...
[2] https://www.questioningchristian.org/2005/10/the_empty_tomb_...
[3] https://www.questioningchristian.org/2006/04/what_did_messia...
[4] https://www.questioningchristian.org/2005/11/jesus_is_lord_d...
It's interesting that every point of this narrative conflicts with the canonical accounts (even excluding the Pauline corpus for this purpose), in which Paul did encounter Jesus, and did at least spend time with (we aren't explicitly told it was spent in study, but presumably it was not exclusively in silent meditation) with disciples of Jesus between the encounter and conversion experience and the start of his ministry, and he got along as well with the other apostles as the other apostles they did with each other.
Paul is, in this terminology, also a prophet. He explicitly says the revelation he tells is not of human origin, and so not passed down to him through e.g. the ministry of one of the students (apostles) of the prophet in question.
It strikes me as unusual to have so much of the theology coming from someone who simply claims private revelation but is not the prophet in question and when the prophet explicitly chose disciples and set a ministry for them.
I am Christian btw, but I support bringing historical and documentary rigor to theology. I also haven't actually doubted anything, at least not of Christ. I've just characterized Paul's gospel and mission as coming from a private and separate revelation, unlike the gospels and missions that the original apostles received.
The point that I made based on that is that it is strange that a lot of the theology of Christianity as it develops centuries later is derived more from the exceptional and privately delivered gospel of Paul, rather than from the gospels of the apostles of Jesus when he also held a historical human form.
I think there is also an obvious scholarly reason for this that doesn't even require belief, which is that Paul's writings are the closest documents we have to the time of historical Jesus. However, that also gives reason for us to be cautious in hanging major theological positions on specific sections in Paul that seem absent from or in tension with the synoptic gospels.
Seneca’s brother, most well known as the recipient of Seneca’s letters, was one such judge who dismissed the charges against him when he found out that he was a citizen.
It's more than that. Basically everywhere he went local commoners wanted to kill him and it was the elite local rulers that safeguarded him
I always assumed it was like tents for vendors at markets, and stuff like that.
"If one doesn't work, one shouldn't eat"
https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/2%20Thessalonians%203%...
The timeline is also problematic because it’s entirely possible Acts was written first. Indeed IMO an earlier dating of Acts is pretty likely, the story is abruptly terminated after Paul has been in Rome two years with no natural conclusion, suggesting the narrative ended there because that took the author up to current events (60), where Josephus obviously wrote much later.