DB> On 04-12-98 Frank Masingill wrote to Day Brown...
 FM> None of this is disputed in general, Day, however, I must say that I
 FM> think you may give more emphasis to the writings attributed to Paul in
 FM> fixing the status of the Church than history strictly allows.  After
 FM> all, the basis of the Petrine Theory is associated with Peter, not Paul,
 FM> and as far as I can see (and I don't claim to be a historical scholar of
 FM> Church history) the Church though its structure right up to the Roman
 FM> Pontiff seems to be a derivative of the Emperial rites reflecting the
 FM> work of Constantine and Theodorus in reversing the Diocletian laws and
 FM> setting Christianity as the sole legal religion of the empire.
 DB> I spoze I gotta cop to using the tools that I have stumbled over, Frank.
 DB> Still, Philemon and Romans 13, both I think accurrately attributed to
 DB> Paul, one: recognized slavery, and two: the divine right of tryanny-
 DB> neither of which was condoned by philosophers, most particularly the
 DB> Stoics, who were trying to construct a more rational cosmology than
 DB> traditional paganism.
   I don't take issue with your critique of Paul as one whose visions led him
into dreams of immortality to begin within his lifetime under the reign of a
universal Christ.  As with Marx's assumption of the end of history having
already occurred, only needing to be transacted towards its inevitability,
this started to become wrong even within his lifetime.
   OTOH, remember that Paul's vision ALSO led him to see the events of his 
wn
time (somewhat as did Plato) as conferring meaning on what we might well see
as senseless because he conceived the axis of Adam - Christ as a progression
and developed for that myth the rationality of the "schoolmaster" image in
which the "past had been prologue."  Given that construction in which history
contained meaning I'm not so sure that it was a mere aberration to see the
Empire as a necessary ingredient in the working out of some divine plan of
history.  Given THAT point of view Romans 13 and the universality preached to
the Athenians makes sense within THAT context.  I suspect that Paul was WELL
acquainted with the ancient Hebrew fable of the "trees in search of a king"
but can one say that the historian, Polybius made any better sense of the
inevitable march of empires from the Persian to the Roman that had produced
the ecumene as it actually WAS in the middle of the first century, BCE.  I
think it is a mistake to judge historical personages by any but standards of
the contemporary times and I suspect you agree with this in principle. Again,
this is certainly no defense of Paul's hyper-enthusiasm that led him to
imagine an abrupt end to the regular process of life and death in the cosmos.
In that he certainly erred.  He was, however, by far, not the only one - just
the most successful - perhaps by reason of his own writings and those of
"Luke."  People at large or not heroic enough to be Stoics.  Most (grin) were
not even heroic enough to be "Christian."  
Sincerely, 
                                     Frank
                                                                              
                                                       
--- PPoint 2.05
---------------