Solo

First, let me say that I for one, do not believe there is any certainty about anything with respect to the historicity of Jesus. If I think there was a historical person around whom most of the Jesus NT mythology has been spun, it is not from any commitment to any historical theory or theology or an absolute internal need to believe anything about the subject matter. It's strictly what makes sense. And on balance of probabilities it makes more sense to me that there was one historical figure, than that there was at the outset an allegorical Wisdom personage who in time was completely historicized.
One of the issues that I have with the mythicist case is that no-one has yet made a case for it that could elegantly tackle the objections it raises from a coherent, factually interlocking, point of view. The closest that I have seen someone come to that would be G.A. Wells, a professor of German in the U.K., who has put together a very interesting theory of Paul's and the other epistles' appartent lack of knowledge of the gospel data on the person of Jesus in the gospels. I was greatly intrigued by Wells' ideas and am greatly indebted to him for many insights into issues I never knew existed. Paul's "silence" is not easily explained away, as it is silence accross the whole spectrum of issues, and where Paul is commenting on issues and espousing ides that the gospels attribute to Jesus, the pap that Paul would not attribute to him his own maxims to him because everyone knew that Jesus had said them would not hold water. There just had to be another explanation for the almost total lack of credible reference to the historical figure of Jesus in Paul's writings. And of course a mythical origin of Paul's Christ and the subsequent Jesus of the gospels has invited itself as a plausible scenario.

Eventually, however I came to believe that Wells was wrong attributing the silence of Paul to his belief that Jesus had lived on earth a long time before his own time. There is I believe a much simpler explanation, one that may be hugely disagreeable to the believers but one that I think is plausible. Paul deeply distrusted his Jerusalem counterparts, and even if his personal epiphanies and psi-material which he came to associate
with the person whose cultic followers he persecuted, made him stop his "persecution of the church", he never believed the same things James' people believed and he competed for converts with them, occasionally damning them to hell.

This scenario of course does not do much for the pious dreams of early common traditions on which the Church was built. Many of teachings of Jesus which Paul received second-hand clashed head on with his own view, none more so than the ideas on resurrection propagated by his followers (e.g. at Corinth). To my mind accepting that Paul's piety did not extend to the earthly figure of Jesus would clear up the mystery of Paul's silence much better than a putative mythic or paleo-historic origin of his Christ.

Interestingly, Wells does not offer much to ground his belief that Paul's vagueness about when Jesus was actually born, died and was resurrected, actually means Paul thought of him as figure from a distant past. He has convinced himself that Paul would not have spoken of a near-contemporary in such exalted terms.

So when was Jesus sent to earth by God according to Paul ? "In the fulness of time", he says in Gal 4:4. But when could that be ?

I have pointed out elsewhere that the argument of Wells collapses almost immediately if we study the modern personality cults. One of the Medvedev brothers, famous Soviet dissidents, said he was red in the face with embarrassment as a university student when he read the hysterical praises heaped on Stalin. He felt deeply offended by such grossly "uncivilized" expression of sycophancy. Kim Jong Il, North Korea's strong man's, official biography includes celestial happenings (rainbow, a supernova) announcing his birth. Further, had Paul lived today, he would have undoubtedly had a diagnosis as his thought contains classical paranoid patterns of self reference to which "Christ" appears to have been present characteristically both as dissociative (it is not I but Christ) and re-associative (we have the mind of Christ) part of a disturbed ego. The highly exalted moods with attendant psi-phenomena that Paul would experience would then be ascribed to and described by him as "Christ". So we cannot really judge from Paul's mental productions when the figure of Jesus was sent down. We cannot say either, simply on the putative finding that Paul was not quite within our standards of personal boundaries, whether his Jesus was a purely phantasy figure or a phantasized relation to a departed historical person.

The letter to the Galatians is a very important witness to Paul's rivalry with the Jerusalem church, or rather with a faction of it that Paul considers dishonest and hypocritical. I have raised the question if a rapid spread of the Jesus cults in which Paul was caught and converted (outside of Palestine, most scholars would agree), itself does not provide enough of a pointer to a historical start of Christianity around 30 CE. In Galatians Paul rails against the hypocritical judaising mission of Peter, which compels converts to observe the law it does not keep itself. He accuses them of hiding or minimizing the offense of the crucifixion (Gal 5:11, 6:12) which Paul calls "just requirement of law" (Rom 8:4). This attack of Paul would make little sense (to his audience) if Jesus was mythical or the event was not in living memory.

There is another important clue in Paul's letters that Jesus death and resurrection was of recent dating. In 1 Cr 15:18-20. Paul ponders what happened to those who "sleep in Christ", i.e. those of his converts who died since Paul started to preach. He calls Christ "first fruits" to them, the first ones to have been resurrected with Christ from the dead. This of course relates only to Paul's "activation" of the mystery. Theoretically, the crucifixion of Jesus could have still happen ages before, and the resurrection only become actionable when Paul was told by God about it. But again that raises the question of what "fullness of time" would have played. Please note, that even if the scheme is delusional (and what Paul proclaims in verse 18 appears a classical case of`Freudian omnipotence of thought, i.e. "ìf you don`t believe me, the believers who are dead will stay dead".) in Paul's frame of reference he stands at the end of time, just before the trumpet goes on.

So I would say, the probability that Paul's phantasm references a person from Paul's life-time is much higher than that it does not.

Jiri

Amaleq13

You might want to take a look at this earlier thread on the same subject started by Ben Smith:

Paul and his older contemporary, Jesus.