Doctor X

Yes . . . apparently never heard of King Arthur, Mithras, Moses, or Pokemon. . . .

--J.D.

pariah

ok, so we have the possibility of paul wanting to gain control. that sounds unlikely to me...i mean he made up storeis about the son of god? what would prompt him to do that?

and then the argument that xianity didnt gain control utnil 300 years later anyway...sooo???

why else?

Cutter

Maybe Paul was just a total whackjob like David Koresh.

Really, the possibilites for why anyone would want to start a religion are limited only by human imagination!

Asha'man

What would prompt Joseph Smith to invent Mormonism?
What would prompt L.Ron Hubbard to invent Scientology?

It’s a good question, but we don’t have to have a precise answer. We know that people do such things, so adding Paul to the long list of religious inventors isn’t really much of a stretch.
I don’t think Paul was trying to take control over an empire, at least not directly.

I do think that one of the early motivations behind the story was to incite rebellious feelings, but that may have been directed mostly towards the Jewish authorities and law. I think the focus of the religion changed over time, and was later used to suppress rebellious feelings. Clearly, the story evolved over time, and I think this is one of the major themes of that evolution.

Occam’s razor must be applied to equal theories, ones that both explain the evidence equally well. The whole point of the Mythical Jesus theory is that many things are poorly explained by the Historical Jesus theory. The amount of information about the life of Jesus really should not explosively increase over time unless people were making stuff up. Paul’s writings look fishy if you read them without ever looking at the Gospels, they don’t seem to say what people think they say.

The important part is to figure out where the invented material came from. If it came from mining of scripture, and from other lines of theological thought that were common in the area, then you have a valid source that simply doesn’t need a historical persona to start the ball rolling. Suddenly, Occam’s razor allows you to get rid of Jesus himself, since he is superfluous to the whole process.

boneyard bill

Almost everything Jesus did in the Gospels, including the miracles, happened, as Paul said, "according to scripture." So if you wanted to reconstruct what happened you go to scripture and see what was foretold and then write a gospel.

That seems to be Doherty's idea of what happened. But what Jesus said is not in the O.T. scripture so where did that come from (the pronouncement stories in Mark as well as gospel Q. And what O.T. scripture would have the Messiah from Galilee? Galilee wasn't even Jewish until it was forceably converted by the Maccabees about a century before Christ.

That seems to me to be one of the greatest difficulties with Doherty's thesis, and I've never seen it addressed.

Viti

The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity by Hyam Maccoby outlines a very plausible theory on Paul's motives and methods. According to this theory, Jesus was one of many candidates for Messiah "King" and Paul simply deified him.

godfry n. glad

As base, the OP question is a good one and any mythicist worth their salt needs to be able to answer it.

It's my supposition that the start of Christianity is based upon a desire to obtain a ticket into the afterlife. As I understand it, the concept of an eternal afterlife was a fairly new one in Jewish circles and was gaining ground all about with the flourishing of the various mystery cults. Mix that with resentment of the power of the corrupt Temple priests and a messiah cult that promised to free the Sacred Land from the grip of the heathen Romans and you get a potent brew.

I suspect that Christianity grew out of a desire to obtain an easy and cheap ticket to Heaven, the new destination of choice. Jesus became the "savior" that acted as the "guide" that got you into the idyllic eternal afterlife...all you had to do was believe. The easy ticket was the source of its spread and its success. The story of a human Jesus morphed out those beginnings, with embellishments to make it attractive in comparison to all the other cults active at the time.

godfry n. glad

offa

Offa,

then why did christianity start?

That is an excellent starting point! I pondered for years over
this question. I was born to an atheist family and went through
trials in grade-school having to say the Lord's Prayer and I was
there when they added "under GOD" to the Pledge of Allegiance.
My wife and my children's spouses and my grandchildren are baptized
Catholics, that is, they are shallow and are willing to accept
the supernatural, whereas, myself, what ever makes them happy makes
me happy.
I discovered that Jesus did exist and was a living - breathing
Hebrew priest. What did Jesus do that was so bad? I knew he did
something naughty but I could not figure what it was that he did.
What Jesus did that was so bad was write John. What was
so bad was that he revealed mysteries of his cult. The reason he was
so evil was that he had left his original cult (adultery) whereas his
brother James (the lame crippled soul who Jesus healed against James
wishes) remained true to the cult. Jesus is identified in John as the
"word". Jesus committed adultery when he was twelve (plus twelve makes
him twenty-four because being an infant was his first twelve years
and at his bar mitzvah he became a one year old Child in A.D. 6). He
was twelve (24) in 17/18 AD and was crucified in 33 AD at the age of
39/40.
Paul believed that Jesus was dead and was surprised when he
discovered him at Damascus (about twelve miles from the real
Jerusalem) and Jesus opened Paul's eyes.
The cult went pretty much into seclusion but Paul had a story
which was the truth (the truth is not necessarily true) that Jesus
had been resurrected. Jesus had survived the crucifixion and had
become non-existent while writing John. When John
started circulating it was a heresy. Writing (authoring) was
illegal in a sense, like today, that our libraries are censored.

Thanks,
Offa

Postcard73

It's been a while since I read Doherty's book, so I hate to say a whole lot about it. I know there are a lot of people on this forum who are much more familiar with it than I am. I think perhaps Doherty would suggest that Paul didn't invent the religion; he just helped repackage it.

Can you please provide any valid reason why this statement should be considered as even possibly true? Even if Jesus did exist, I see no reason to believe that what appears in the Bible is an accurate depiction of his life and actions. I believe the earliest of Paul's letters are dated more than twenty years after Jesus traditionally died. How can we possibly expect that after twenty years of oral re-telling, what we have is what originally existed? A huge part of Ronald Reagan's public career can be viewed today courtesy of videotape, yet everytime you turn around, there's a new book about him. If modern historians with access to a huge database of historical evidence in the forms of video, books, speeches, newspapers, etc., can't figure out what was going on with Reagan, then how can we realistically expect Paul to accurately compile the life of Jesus with nothing more than an oral history? Never mind the generally held belief that the gospels, which much more directly attempt to tell the actual story of Jesus' life, weren't written until even later!

Despite the fact that I am an atheist, I never doubted that Jesus existed until I read Doherty's book. Doherty did not convince me that Jesus never existed, but he did convince me that the existence of a historical Jesus was not the foregone conclusion it is so often assumed to be. I personally think Jesus' existence is a mystery that will never be solved...

Doctor X

I gather than the fact he is born twice ten years appart is "fairly accurate?"

--J.D.