Gregg

I have sent an e-mail reply to Smashingidols regarding his reply to Peter Kirby's post asking for arguments against Earl Doherty's "Jesus Myth" thesis, but I also wanted to address his comments in the forum. Since Kirby's thread has been set up for a specific purpose, I'm starting a new thread.

Smashingidols stated the following:

In my reply to Smashingidols, I had to admit that I found it difficult to accept that he had in fact read Doherty's book "in its entirety." He is basing his objection to Doherty's thesis on a strawman, since Doherty never suggests that Paul "gave birth" to Christianity. Doherty makes it very clear that he believes "Christianity" in various forms existed before Paul encountered it. Paul simply had a "spiritual" experience or epiphany of some sort (possibly while reading the Scriptures) that convinced him that an already existing faith, one that he had persecuted, was true--he didn't "invent" Jesus. He probably wasn't even the first to preach "Christ crucified" if the hymn he quotes in Philippians is any indication.

(I am not sure what Smashingidols means by "...he makes absolutely no case as for what that inspiration was...". Doherty covers what Paul has to say about his conversion. What else can he do? He can't read Paul's mind.)

Furthermore, Doherty questions the whole idea that Paul had as much influence during his lifetime as is commonly believed. This view of Paul is based on Acts and on the fact that so many of Paul's letters were preserved. But Acts is widely regarded as a largely fictional account of the origin of the Church, and Paul's letters may have been preserved not because they were widely read and exceptionally influential at the time they were written, but because the doctrine of "Christ crucified" did, over time, become the most common form of Christianity (partly due to the increasing popularity of the Gospels) and Paul's letters supported this doctrine.

In his last comment, Smashingidols is ignoring the picture Doherty carefully paints of the political, social, religious, and philosophical state of the Roman Empire in the first century CE. Many people were open to hearing the Christian teaching (and not just Paul's version of it) because they were already primed for it. The various elements of the faith were already out there--Greek teachings about the Logos/Christ, Jewish apocalyptic and messianic expectation, the mystery cults with their dying/rising savior gods, etc., etc. Christianity effectively tied all these religious and philosophical strands together. Given all this, there's no need to posit "some sort of oral historical tradition" to explain Christianity's initial appeal.

Gregg