Originally posted by psstein
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I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.
Which is in line with the various other statements in the Pauline epistles about having visions of Jesus and getting teachings from them, as I discussed in the other thread. Paul tells one church that the cut-off for the authority of such visions is if anyone says "Jesus be cursed" you know they're not speaking with authority from God's spirit (1 Cor 12:3) but if they say "Jesus is Lord" then they are being guided by the Holy Spirit and presumably whatever else they have to say is divinely revealed truth. And elsewhere Paul asks that the people in the church who have spiritual powers to get teachings from Jesus will be able to confirm that Jesus totally agrees with the long list of church rules Paul appears to be making up (the gospels don't appear to give any support to them) regarding speaking in tongues and women being silent: "Anyone who claims to be a prophet, or to have spiritual powers, must acknowledge that what I am writing to you is a command of the Lord." (1 Cor 13:37)
In the Pauline churches, there seems to be a lot of getting teachings from Jesus in visions occurring. More than a few scholars have called the Pauline churches "proto-gnostic" for this reason, and there seems to be a continuum from them into the later fully fledged gnostic Christianity of the 2nd century where spiritual information obtained through spiritual visions was the order of the day. Paul certainly seems to want to make it clear in Galatians 1 that he does not need, nor is he subservient to, the existing Christian Jesus-disciples and their gospels or preachings about Jesus, because he got his gospel from divine revelation. Paul is at the very least pretending to his churches and trying to have them believe that his teachings come from visions and have not been passed onto him by men who heard Jesus talk in the flesh. I happen to think it's most likely that Paul is lying here and that actually his knowledge about Jesus almost certainly does come from the earlier disciples and theirs likely comes from actually interacting with Jesus. But I would also say it's also possible that it's visions all the way down - i.e. Paul is getting getting his information from the earlier disciples who themselves got it from a vision and Jesus only ever existed in the visions of the members of the early Christian cult group and was not actually a fleshly person.
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