No particular offense intended. I just thought up a rather perplexing issue with Christianity and would like to hear what it's proponents would have to say for this
It strikes me now, upon consideration, as someone who's reasonably familiar with the Bible (deconverted Christian, read it in its entirety several times), that, taking it at its face value, there doesn't seem to be any particular internal reason for one to take any of the writings of/concerning Paul at their word.
Assuming the narrative of the gospels to be accurate, it would seem that Jesus, upon ascending to heaven, left his 'authority' with his disciples, Peter in particular. From there, his disciples spread out around the Roman Empire and elsewhere making converts and spreading Jesus's teaching, effectively founding the Church.
At some point relatively later, though still in the lifetime of the disciples, schisms begin to form between differing factions of allegedly Christ-aligned religious advocates. Paul himself being only one such man. Per his own presented narrative, he claims to have met Jesus on the road to Damascus, been converted there, etc. but it strikes me that there were a good number of others also claiming to have received the true revelation of Jesus, most of whom have seemed to have faded into historical obscurity, but seem on the face of it, to have equally plausible (ie. unfalsifiable) claim to Paul.
As far as I can tell, beyond his disciples, Jesus himself never seems to name which, if any of these individuals would be his 'true' followers, so there seems to be nothing, objectively, from Jesus himself confirming Paul's authority except for Paul's own claimed narrative.
Basically, I don't see how one draws a logical connection between the authority of Jesus and that of Paul, particularly when some of Paul's teachings seem relatively at odds with the religious teachings Jesus put forth. The more I think of it, it strikes me as quite odd that the writings of Paul are given equal canonical weight with the gospels concerning Jesus, and those writings of his disciples (who Jesus directly stated to be his true followers). Can any Christians shed some light on the underlying reasoning here, because I'm really not seeing it.
