LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY guma_kawauso)

Thinking about the Bible and current situations made me wonder something. Perhaps somone can help me better understand what happened... hehe

Okay, After Jesus's reported death, cults that glorified Jesus... Christians... were looked down upon by the Romans because instead of incorporating into the Roman pantheon, the Christians asserted that their god was the only one and all other gods were false. The romans then hunted down the cultists and either made them renounce what they said, imprisoned them for life, or killed them.

Then was have the individual known as Paul. He helped create a new church using the same cultish beliefs, and was sought after by the romans for his teachings. They eventually catch him and lock him up.

Now in perspective, how did Paul manage to get his letters out of prison? If the Romans in his time were trying to squelch the rise of the new Christian cult, how did Paul's letter get out of prison to the major churches of the region? Someone suggested to me that maybe the guards were really in the cult too, and smuggled out the letters, but if that was the case, wouldn't it have been just as easy to "lose" Paul?

Now to a certain point, I believe the Bible is as important to use as Aesop's Fables. Aesop's Fables taught us morals using stories.. much like the Bible. But after the book of Acts, I wonder, how much of this is really what it's supposed to be? The way the Roman Empire hated the new cult has always made me wonder how these letters, the Epistiles (sp?) managed to get out. It would have required a massive network which couldn't have been around at the time.. the cult was still too new. And if it could have even been possible to have such an extensive network, how could one really be sure that it would be uncorrupted?

But I suppose the flip side would be that other letters might be floating out there because they were intercepted.

What are your views? Were these letters just an invention like what has been claimed with Revelation? were these letters invented by the Church in order to set up rules in which later followers could adhere to? I'd really like to know other people's take on this.