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The Pauline writings are evidence of FICTION or LIES.

A Pauline writer claimed he got his gospel from Jesus the Messiah who was RAISED from the dead on the THIRD DAY. Such a claim is most likely fiction or a LIE.

No-one can find a Jewish Messiah called Jesus of Nazareth before the Fall of the Jewish Temple and no one can find a credible source that a Messiah of the Jews was ever RAISED from the dead on the THIRD DAY.

The Pauline writer is either writing fiction or LYING.

A Pauline writer claimed he persecuted Jesus believers or those who preached the Faith he NOW preached. No-one can find any one who preached any Pauline faith with the name Saul, Paul, Jesus, Cephas, Peter, James, John, Barnabas, Titus, Philemon, or any name in the Pauline writings before the Fall of the Temple.

The Pauline writings are evidence of FICTION or a PACK OF LIES.

Josephus did NOT write such FICTION about John the Baptist as the Pauline writers invented about Jesus.

John the Baptist may have been historical but the Pauline resurrected Jesus on the THIRD DAY was pure FICTION.

No Robots

How many Napoleons are there: the Corsican ogre, the embodiment of the Revolution, the military genius?

No Robots

Indeed. So, we need to undertake a programme of comparative literature. Why question the historicity of Christ alone when we have all kinds of figures of a similar nature in works like the Talmud, for example?

bacht

I don't know how much Paul can be trusted. If this material was written in the 2nd C by someone like Marcion then it's not much help in historical reconstruction of the 1st C. He represents the gentile focus of later Catholicism, as opposed to the original Jewish conception.

If there was a real Paul in the pre-70 or pre-135 period he would seem to have been an apocalyptic preacher, whose ideas were provisional. Or he could have been a gnostic, presenting the experience of being "in Christ" and having Christ "in you"

There are different possibilities. The most extreme mythicist position would be that every instance of Christ in the literature came from visions or scripture interpretations. There may have been more than one Christ of this type.

An intermediate position would be that the Jesus was modelled on some real person who was dressed up in Christian theological trimmings. MaryHelena has been working with this kind of model.

This is a problem with all biblical studies, and ancient studies in general. Reading the Bible as history, written in the manner of and for the same purposes as modern people, is just wrong.

Your preferred explanations seem to downplay the irrational element in all this, such as half-mad preachers and propagandistic texts. If ancient Roman subjects were really rational they would have stuck with Aristotle or the Alexandrian experimenters. The foundation for modern science was there, but we had to survive a millenium of hocus pocus first.

ApostateAbe

Great. To be clear, none of us believe that Paul can be trusted. The issue that Doug Shaver brought up is that the writings of Paul count as "contrary evidence" in favor of a mythical Jesus. I argued that they do not. If there was no real Paul in the first century CE, then it only means that the Pauline writings are irrelevant to the topic.
Yes, good point. I actually think that such a model of Jesus is easier to challenge, because it is much easier to explain the theologically-strange-but-seemingly-historical elements of the gospels if it is posited that the historical Jesus actually fit the rough profile of Jesus drawn by the synoptic gospels. The extreme mythicists tend to take far too many skeptical steps backward and will tend to deny almost any historical probability. Most of the so-called "mythicists" around this forum are not actually mythicists, but are better described as "Jesus-agnostics," or, as a I call them, "normalskeptics," meaning they have no historical conclusions for whatever reason.
I like to think that I take such things into account. Very many of the differences in the gospels seem explainable in terms of evangelistic advantage and apologeticism.

bacht

Are you talking about normal people or divine ones? If it's a semi-legendary rabbi or prince then theoretically there could be some real history behind the story. If it's Gabriel wielding a sword against the angel of Parthia what can we say?

You seem to relate to this metaphysical stuff, maybe you could help us understand these pre-modern people.

No Robots

It is not a question of understanding metaphysics, but of understanding literature. When English propaganda calls Napoleon an ogre, does anyone think that it is referring to a something like Shrek? When the Gospels say that Christ raised a man from the dead, does anyone here think that really happened? Yet we all accept know that Napoleon conquered most of Europe. We also know that someone stated that the meek shall inherit the Earth. Whoever that person was, I call Christ.

bacht

Well, that leaves us with 1st C material like the Shepherd of Hermas and Revelation.
Did the whole thing start as a variation of Jewish apocalyptic?
Were there Jewish gnostics in the 1st C, maybe followers of John the Baptist?
What about Qumran, did those people have anything to do with the Christ idea, maybe after 70?
The original version of the gospel of Matthew seems to have been a Jewish-Christian text, do we know who or what that Christ was?
Was there a quasi-Cynic Q teacher somewhere in the mix?

PhilosopherJay

Hi No Robots,

The writer of Psalm 37.11 was Christ?

10 For yet a little while, and the wicked shall not be: yea, thou shalt diligently consider his place, and it shall not be.
11 But the meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace.

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

bacht

I believe the official Catholic interpretation of these things is more or less literal, that is, that Christ really did raise Lazarus, that he really said the things in the Sermon on the Mount etc. Certainly modern fundamentalists use this approach.

I agree that literary analysis is a useful tool for biblical study. But matters of theology have their own 'logic'