Originally Posted by Solo

And that, you propose, vouches for the opinion that Jesus, who Paul was informed, was anointed in heaven after a sorry end on earth, was not Paul's near-contemporary. Right ?

Why would you be opposed to the idea that in modern terms, Paul was essentially a psycho,

Originally Posted by Solo

who knew everybody was wrong about Jesus, because he (Paul) was in third-heaven where he got the gospel info about the real Jesus written up in his body ?

And if you are not opposed to it, then Paul's argument with Jerusalem "pillars" about the truth of the gospel could very well have been about someone who was crucified recently and whom Cephas and John (and, if I am right the third "pillar" James) knew personally and from whom they principally derived their own authority among the converts.

Paul of course did not accept this authority. They knew Jesus "in flesh" and tried to hide the fact that in legal terms Jesus was an executed criminal (Gal 5:12). Paul "knew" the gospel of the Spirit, who told him it was all pre-arranged by God, for Paul to show God used his son Jesus to nip sin in the bud, and that if you are good and abstain from sex (well, ok, if you burn with passion, he'd give you a grudging pass) you are going into the heavens of Jesus (as Christ) that Paul visited.

So, even if this is only a conter-hypothesis, it fits the texts (plus ou moins), so I say, you've got nothing to conclude on to say Jesus was not living near Paul's time.


This is Catholic deconstructionism with the underwear inside out.
The Church says one cannot make sense of what Paul is talking about because you do not have the Holy Spirit which is the Church property. You say one cannot make sense of what Paul is talking about because what you don't have his signature on it.

So the best you can say is that the text is "unfathomed" but of course that would not prevent you to "conclude" that Jesus was (or was not) a near contemporary of Paul. Whether you go one way or the other would then depend largely on where your jesuitic predilections are schooled.

Jiri

Originally Posted by Iasion

Hiya,

If the argument was :
"Jesus must have existed because all religions have founders",

then
this argument is shown false, as many religions have a central figure who did not exist.


Iasion

Originally Posted by Didymus

The argument that the various Jesus pericopes and quotes found in the gospels must be accurate merely because they could be accurate is a weak one indeed, but that hasn't prevented stalwart Christians from making it, despite the lack of evidence that the Greek-speaking, Hellenized writers of the gospels even adhered to the Rabbinic tradition that supposedly fostered scrupulous accuracy.

It is one thing to ascertain the accuracy of scribal transmissions based on a multiplicity of earlier writings; it is quite another to impute "great care and accuracy" to unidentified individuals transcribing oral and written material of unknown provenance. Their geographical origins are unknown, and they wrote from unknown locations. They all derived their material from Mark, who, after the Romans destroyed the second Temple in Jerusalem, updated and expanded selected passages from the Septuagint, shaping them into a tidy "historical" narrative about a wandering worker of wonders who was supposedly crucified by the authorities forty years earlier. They added quotes and other biographical material from the lost Q gospel, regarding which no provenance can be determined, along with an expanded birth story and a couple of politically-inspired crucifixion narratives. Whether these plagiarists made any use of multiple sources or other means to verify the claims they reasserted is unknown - but there are no assertions to that effect.

Given all that, the gospel tales are worse than even hearsay; they have no more evidentiary value than the "urban legends" encountered on the Internet. As such, any judge in any court would strike them from the record. They cannot even be taken with the proverbial grain of NaCl - but seem to go down nicely if preceded by a large dollop of faith.

Ddms

Originally Posted by J-D

The only other explanation I have seen offered here with a similar amount of concrete detail ...

Originally Posted by spamandham

Well, that really isn't saying much, since there is nothing concrete at all in the proposition that there is a historical core to Jesus.

Originally Posted by spamandham

That said, there are several other ideas floating around that are about as half baked as the historical core idea:

- Jesus as pure fiction; Mark, (or something close to it) was an actual work of fiction (allegorical under 1 scenario) that turned into a religion, much like Star Wars has spawned the modern Church of the Jedi. After a few decades, people no longer knew it was fiction.

- Jesus as legend; The Jesus character is nothing more than the continued evolution of much older stories, such as Joshua

- Jesus as gnostic myth; The concept of the "salvation of YHWH" (aka Jesus) started off as colorful gnostic language to describe an inner change and turned into a historical Jesus over time by those who found the ideas interesting but didn't understand them

- Jesus as part of a new fiat religion imposed by Constantine

Originally Posted by Jeffrey Gibson

Umm, you've equivocated here between founder and central figure. There are religions whose central figures are not their founders.

Originally Posted by Jeffrey Gibson

And in any case, your conclusion is not as slam dunk as you think it is, since there are; also religions which have central figures (and even founders) who did exist.

Originally Posted by Jeffrey Gibson

I take it you've never had a course in logic -- or that if you did, you failed it (or have forgotten what you learned in it).

Originally Posted by J-D

The only other explanation I have seen offered here with a similar amount of concrete detail ...

Originally Posted by spamandham

Well, that really isn't saying much, since there is nothing concrete at all in the proposition that there is a historical core to Jesus.

That said, there are several other ideas floating around that are about as half baked as the historical core idea:

- Jesus as pure fiction; Mark, (or something close to it) was an actual work of fiction (allegorical under 1 scenario) that turned into a religion, much like Star Wars has spawned the modern Church of the Jedi. After a few decades, people no longer knew it was fiction.

Originally Posted by J-D

Indeed. I don't deny it. I'm not setting the bar high.

Originally Posted by Solitary Man

Can you support this from the text ...

Originally Posted by J-D

There's also the possibility that Paul was a conscious and intentional fraud, a con man on the make, a charlatan, a first-century equivalent of Joseph Smith.