Hi Jarhyn. I have always had respect for you. I don't know if you consider yourself a "mythicist" or not, but I am still interested in an answer to my question.
Please start by just telling me if you understand the question (actually four closely related questions) that I posed above. And understand why dbz's "response" was ridiculous.
The question I am asking you now has NOTHING to do with Jesus or ancient documents. I am trying to understand if I use English the same as everyone else.
I see Paul as an original Chrestian, following the Chrestus cult, which would be primarily active some time in 60-100, with active Jewish detractors. It is entirely possible at that time that Paul met with someone who has direct interactions with them. Nobody denies Chrestus had an impact in the early years of the movement, and was probably the first "big name Jesus".
I don't deny the life of Jesus Chrestus, so Chrestus and his cult having someone involved named James claiming brotherhood is not something I deny happening.
This explains why in letters he didn't directly reference Chrestus, either.
The gospels didn't exist at all yet at that point and these letters are from when the cult was quite young, I expect.
Other Jesuses came later than the Pauline letters.
Nobody, again, denies that Chrestus lived some time around 0, and that folks were talking about him.
The question is whether the character written about in the gospels is actually him, to witch I say "absolutely not". The gospels were written over a hundred years later, after two more Jesuses had lived and died.
So when between 0 and 160, at least two more Jesuses lived and died and spawned followers and cults...
The existing cult just absorbed the followers and the beliefs and the biographies of each successive Jesus.
Then some time late 2nd century, someone dug into all those historical documents (of which there were more available to the contemporary interest), and amalgamated all the later ones onto the frame of the Chrestus legends, whole updating his name with the origin stories of later individuals.
All of the documents of Chrestians are documenting a proto-cult, and possibly just Chrestus. Which is to say "the first or one of the first progenitors of a cult".
I dismiss, like most, any clear later revisions. Rather I see that cult as having likely mostly fizzled down to something quiet and small by 100ce to be reawakened by Ben Ananus and Ben Stada, among others.
This secondary wave of Jesuses would be what we're amalgamated into the older cults and what allows the history to become enough of a general interest to leverage the Markian "gospel" into popularity.
Of course, with a slick presentation like the gospel, it is much like "reading it on the internet", as has been noted. Lies told closer to the truth grow longer legs.
All of this accounts and interacts well with the documents we have and the parts we understand not to be forgeries, even the Pauline letters (though they may be!).
I'll note that even as early as 60, the cults were clearly starting to schism and the truth becoming uncertain of Chrestus's life, with clear evidence of converting a historical person into a mytheme if the Pauline letters were to be believed as original.
