From what I can tell about Paul...
The Assembly at Jerusalem wanted nothing to do with him.
And, from this perspective...
The "offering" he took to them can be viewed in one of two ways...
Either...
A) He was desparately seeking their approval...
-- To the point where he was willing to "buy"...
-- Their Letters of Introduction...
-- (Which he later claimed he had no need for).
Or...
B) At a time when things were rather tough in Jerusalem...
-- Especially for those who were trying to organize...
-- A rebellion against their Roman Oppressors...
Paul showed up with an Ostentatious Gift of Generosity.
Thus, lording it over his detractors by...
-- Heaping "coals" of "kindness" upon the heads of his "enemies".
Either way...
He didn't get those letters...
And...
"Some" people continued to call him a "Liar".
-- The "Man of a Lie" being one of the main characters...
-- In the Sectarian Writings, found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.
3) Time
Take as much time as you want... or, need.
And...
If you don't get back to it this time around...
-- What the heck...
-- These topics have a way of rolling around again... and again... and...
Well...
Whatever...
Life Happens and...
-- We can always pick it up again later.
In the meantime...
Here's another article...
-- From September 11, 2001...
About the Vatican making changes to the Bible...
Based on "recent revelations" found in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
This one was taken from the London Times Online...
But, it appears as though their copy is no longer available... Online...
Vatican allows Scrolls change
TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 11 2001
FROM RICHARD OWEN IN ROME
THE Vatican is to abandon decades of secrecy and obstruction to allow changes in the Bible based on revelations in the Dead Sea Scrolls, more than half a century after they were discovered.
The extent of the changes is expected to be disclosed this month, but the revised version of the New Jerusalem Bible will take five years to complete.The scrolls have been the subject of controversy between Jewish and Roman Catholic scholars since they were found in caves at Qumran on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea in 1947. The Vatican has been accused of keeping them secret for fear that they would undermine Christianity.
In The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, two British authors, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, accused the Vatican of suppressing the scrolls because they contained material at odds with accepted Christian belief.
The Jerusalem Bible, which was first published in French in 1956, appeared in English ten years later. The writer J. R .R. Tolkien was one of the translators. It is the official text for use in Roman Catholic liturgy and revisions are subject to approval by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Popes keeper of doctrine.
Father Gianluigi Boschi, a Dominican theologian at the Pontifical University of St Thomas Aquinas in Rome and a leading expert on the scrolls, said the recent growth in scroll scholarship and the publication of previously inaccessible scrolls meant that some of the changes would be radical. He is to address a conference on the changes this month.
Father Boschi said that the project would link "the whole picture of the origins of Christianity" to the findings at Qumran. He declined to say which passages would be modified, but predicted that the changes would be "surprising and innovative". It was time to end to "the extraordinary scenarios put about by conspiracy theorists who claim that the Vatican has manoeuvred to hide the truth about the Dead Sea Scrolls."
Several of the intact scrolls, preserved in terracotta jars at Qumran by an ascetic sect called the Essenes, are now kept at the purpose-built Israeli Shrine of the Book. Many of the other texts and tens of thousands of scroll fragments were bought with the aid of Vatican funds and have been under the control of Dominican scholars at the Ecole Biblique et Archéologique Française in Jerusalem since the 1950s.
The failure to publish more than a fraction of the Ecole Biblique scrolls led the Oxford biblical scholar Geza Vermes to call it "the academic scandal of the 20th century".
Hershel Shanks, editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review in Washington and author of Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls, said that "unbiased Catholic experts" were now in the forefront of scroll scholarship. He said it was hard to imagine what the scrolls could contain that could undermine Christianity.
Minor adjustments have already been made to the Jerusalem Bible in the light of the two scrolls versions of the Book of Isaiah.
