gurugeorge

It's plausible, but it's less plausible and more convoluted than the mythicist alternative.

You have to bear in mind the ultimate broader context of what religions are, and how they start. 90% of religions start thus: person "sees God" (seems to themselves to talk to God/spirit/demon whatever), gets "message", brings the "message" to humanity. This holds across all cultures, across all levels of sophistication, from Shamanism to Celestial Masters Daoism, from Mormonism to Islam. Even Buddhism, the most rationalistic and least religion-like religion, has this type of thing.

That's overwhelmingly the most likely origin for Christianity too, if we're going on probabilities. Now, if there were good reason to think that a human being called Jesus Christ existed, we could pin that type of origin on him (he was the guy who thought he talked to God and brought back a message); but there's no good reason to believe a human being of that name ever existed (no clear connection between early mentions of the Jerusalem people and a human being/preacher, etc., they knew), so the alternative is much more likely, and the culprit must be "Paul"/the original Jerusalem crowd.

As I've said before, compare and contrast: we have clear evidence, from his own words, that "Paul"'s Jesus was a visionary entity. We have no evidence of the same strength to suggest that any of the people "Paul" is talking about, the Jerusalem people, ever knew a human being preacher or teacher.

2-J

This actually made me laugh out loud

aa5874

But, that is what the evidence shows. Jesus was just a backdated belief. He really was not physical.

The Phantom can move from heaven to earth and back seamlessly without leaving any physical trace of his existence.

And that is what all the hundreds of writings about Jesus have shown.

No supposed contemporary of Jesus in the NT described his physical appearance yet, they described his appearance when he transfigured.

The Pauline writer did not write that he saw Jesus alive before he died, but claimed he and over 500 people saw Jesus in a resurrected state.

The supposed first bishop of Rome, Peter, did not see Jesus physically walking on water and could not have been saved from drowning by the very water walker. This is fantasy, this must be belief.

The supposed first bishop of Rome, Peter, could not have seen Jesus physically transfigure where his face shone like the sun, where dead people, Moses and Elijah, appeared from nowhere and God talked in a cloud.

These are fantasy, belief, not reality.

The history of Jesus in the NT can only be belief not reality.

Marcion was right. People simply BELIEVED Jesus was real.

ApostateAbe

You must be referring to 2 Peter 1:16. Go ahead and look it up, and tell me your interpretation of it. Here is the full passage:

16We did not follow cleverly invented stories when we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. 17For he received honor and glory from God the Father when the voice came to him from the Majestic Glory, saying, "This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased." 18We ourselves heard this voice that came from heaven when we were with him on the sacred mountain.

BibleGateway.com has a footnote that cites the synoptic gospel passages that roughly fit the quote, "This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased." If you look up those passages, you find that it refers to the "Transfiguration" event, where Jesus went on a mountain top, God spoke from a cloud in the heavens, Jesus' face became radiant, his clothes became white, Moses and Elijah talked to Jesus, and other things reportedly happened depending on which synoptic gospel you read. This is probably the second-most important miracle in Christianity, and, as you can imagine, there would be considerable doubt about the claim from inside and out, the same as for any miracle claim in any religion. The Second Epistle of Peter was reportedly written by the Apostle Peter, but wasn't--it was written in the second century--and it is apparently an insistence by the pretended Peter that he really did see the "Transfiguration" event. And that seems to be the limit of it. The claim by Doherty was that the earliest Christians knew that they were following mere myths. Does Doherty use 2 Peter 1:16 as one of his arguments in favor of that theory?

ApostateAbe

I like the way you think. I do have some disagreement. You say that there is no clear connection between early mentions of the Jerusalem people and Jesus? I know this has been brought up many times before, but Paul mentions three reputed pillars of the church in Galations 2:9: James, Peter and John. Paul reportedly met James, who he identified as "the brother of the Lord," and James is reported as the name of one of the brothers of Jesus in Matthew 13:55 and Mark 6:3. Peter is reportedly a direct disciple of Jesus, with whom Paul gets into a nasty debate. The counts as evidence that Jesus existed, because his reputed brother and followers clearly existed. Ad hoc explanations can be made, yes, like maybe "brother" is only a metaphorical brother, and maybe the real Peter was integrated into the gospel stories in a completely fictional role. But the most likely explanation is that Jesus existed, really did have a brother named James, and really did have disciples including Peter and John. The ad hoc explanations need evidence in order to hold weight, because ad hoc explanations can be used to make any theory consistent with the evidence. Likelihood is more important than consistency.

Clivedurdle

(Wiki)

Is the bolded part a direct eyewitness statement if it was not written until between 80 and 150 in common era?

GakuseiDon

I don't want to sidetrack this, but out of interest: if Paul's Jesus was a visionary entity how do you account for all the "in the flesh" statements? E.g. Romans 9:3:

For I could wish that I myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my *countrymen according to the flesh, 4 who are Israelites, to whom pertain the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the service of God, and the promises; 5 of whom are the fathers and from whom, according to the flesh, Christ came

Elijah

I don’t think this is correct. Religions start by trying to address a problem with implementing certain ideas that visions give credibility to. The visions don’t give birth to the ideas that start religion they confirm them. Jesus wasn’t wandering in the desert and accidently had a vision he went out there to try and figure something out and the vision confirmed for him what he was already suspecting. Same with Paul, the idea didn’t spontaneously come to him it was an idea he was pondering and the vision confirmed it. I think that’s 90 percent of the time, the real world problem/question first, and then ideas to address those problems, then last visions to confirm the idea you think is correct.

I can imagine an early childhood visionary experience giving a person their initial faith but the religions we are familiar with are complex collections of ideas that are produced in attempt to fix/address the world’s problems not just birthed randomly out of visionary states.

gurugeorge

No, it's not ad hoc, the idea that a physical brother is meant is what's ad hoc. The term is quite plainly used as a "term of art" denoting some sort of community/religious role or status elsewhere in "Paul". Especially consider:

What I've put as "sister woman" seems to be usually translated as "believing wife", but the literal term is adelphon gunaika.

So is the text normalising incest (since "brothers of the Lord" appear to be taking "sisters" as companions!!!)? Or is it a "term of art"?

(Also, if it's siblinghood, just how many damn brothers and sisters did he have? )

As to Peter - well, look and see if anywhere in "Paul" either Peter or Cephas (who may or may not have been the same person) is mentioned in any sort of context that might indictate they knew Jesus Christ as a human being, that they were at any time disciples of a living human being (a preacher, a revolutionary, or whatever).

As I said, if there was anything in "Paul" like "Cephas told me that Jesus had said to him ...." that would be clear evidence of a human being behind the myth (at least it would be for me, it would convince me). Now the fact that there isn't anything of that kind could be for any number of reasons (on the HJ scenario): we can all think up some reasons. But the fact is, there isn't anything like that.

So why posit that ANY of these people ("Paul", the Jerusalem people) were talking about a human Jesus whom some of them had known personally (bracketing the question of whether they thought he was also divine in some sense)?

Just based on what's in "Paul", the entity being spoken of is clearly a visionary entity - certainly a visionary entity whom they all believed had been on earth at some point in the recent past, clothed in flesh in some sense, and been crucified; but there is not the slightest suggestion that any of them had personally known this entity whose existence they believed in. And it's this personal connection that's needed to make HJ more plausible.

gurugeorge

Likely scenario (to my mind): "Paul" gets into a trance state, a glorious being appears in his vision who tells him "I am the Messiah, I was recently here on Earth, in the flesh, born of the line of David."

What's the problem?