Online Seminar: Peter Lythe on the Miracles and Nonsense of St Paul

About this event:

‘Not Paul, but Jesus’ represented a significant advancement in Bentham’s strategy to undermine religion in general, and to subvert the authority of revealed religion in particular, in that his evaluation of an important part of the Biblical canon in terms of its utility was allied to an explicit challenge to the idea that it proclaimed the truth. That challenge comprised two fundamental assertions: first, that the religion masquerading as Christianity was not truly and substantively Christian in that it did not correspond to the religion that had allegedly been revealed to mankind by Jesus; and, second, that the claims of this substitute Christianity were largely, and designedly, untrue. Bentham’s thesis was that authentic Christianity had been deliberately perverted by the false doctrines of the man who in the years immediately following Jesus’ death had sought to establish himself as the leader of the burgeoning Christian community. The ostensible religion of Jesus, in other words, was really the religion of St Paul. Bentham set out to sweep away the harmful and dishonest teachings of Paul so that only the religion of Jesus, properly conceived, would be left - left to religionists to do with as they pleased, and left to Bentham to take as his final target in his offensive against religion.

Bentham’s forensic testing of the truth of the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles of Paul led him to conclude that Paul had been a liar, a hypocrite, and a fraud whose enterprise was nothing more than one of personal ambition. Far from being in receipt of a special commission from the Almighty, Paul had calculated that by becoming the leader of the followers of Jesus he could obtain the wealth, power, and reputation that he craved. Drawing upon all of the material written for ‘Not Paul, but Jesus’, much of which remains unpublished, this paper will explore the methods that, according to Bentham, Paul had employed in order to achieve his self-interested ends. First, the paper will explain how Paul’s visions, trances, exorcisms, healings, and other events of a supposedly miraculous kind lent support to Bentham’s view that the inculcation of ‘faith in the abstract’, or blind credulity, had been an essential component of Paul’s effort to ‘deliver men’s minds bound into his hands’; and, second, the paper will examine why Bentham thought the ‘deluge of nonsense’ that was Pauline scripture - its ‘abuse of words’, ‘irrelevant argumentation’, and multiple other deficiencies of logic and language - formed not an obstacle, but an efficient, and even a necessary, aid to people’s accepting the religion of Paul.

Joining instructions:

The seminar will take place using the Microsoft Teams platform, which can be accessed via a laptop or desktop computer as a web app, or downloaded, from https://products.office.com/en-gb/microsoft-teams/group-chat-software. Microsoft Teams can also be downloaded as an app for your Android or Apple smartphone. Please do ensure that you register an account with Microsoft Teams before the event.

Please register your ‘attendance’ at the seminar using Eventbrite. You will then be added to a ‘Team’ called ‘Online Bentham Seminar, 29 April 2020’. Simply then make sure that you have logged in to Microsoft Teams for 17.00 BST on 29 April, and accept the call when the event starts. To save bandwidth and to ensure the best quality audio and video from our speakers, when you join the call (see image below) please ensure that your own video and audio buttons are set to the ‘off’ position and are greyed out.

Queries:

If you have any other queries about the seminar (particularly technical queries), please do contact Tim Causer (t dot causer at ucl dot ac dot uk). If you are unable to attend the seminar, the talks will be recorded and made available afterwards.

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