Did Paul create Jesus?

[TomC]

I agree with Tom, but wish he'd explicitly stipulated that the Nazarene crucified under Pontius Pilate was a historical person.

Well, I was talking about Paul, not the Nazarene. I've expressed my opinion about that in many other posts.

Including the fact that there's no evidence that Jesus died on the cross. One explanation, that I find somewhat plausible, for the Resurrection stories is that Jesus didn't die on the cross. He was condemned to death on a cross by Pilate, but it didn't happen. His followers would need to explain why people saw Him later. So, they made up something about a supernatural event.

Who knows? It could have happened. More plausible, to me, than a Miraculous Resurrection.

But almost anything would be.
Tom

 

[TomC]

If you really thought that I'm a bot, then we'd have a serious problem on our hands.

You might have a problem. It certainly wouldn't be a problem for me.

So getting back to the OP, we know Paul existed and was one of the first Christians.

No. We definitely do not "know" that. Despite your insistence that you know stuff about ancient people and events. Stuff you cannot possibly know.

And you have a way of demonstrating that you don't know as much as you believe you do, by asserting things like "There's a collection of writings attributed to an ancient guy. Therefore he must have existed."
Tom

 

[DBT]

Aren't there several independent references to Paul and his mission? Clement, Ignatius, Eusebius, etc....?

The single biggest problem here is that whatever happened, it was almost 2000 years ago. Left no hard evidence.

There's no real way to know much about any of it. Sorting the agendas, motivations, and abilities is simply not possible. It's nearly impossible to do it in the modern world concerning living people. Trying to figure out what people in the ancient world were really getting up to, and why?
Can't be done

Tom

How far do we go with the argument for mythology...that was not Clement who wrote about Paul, that there was no Ignatius or the others that wrote about Paul? It becomes improbable that it's an elaborate web of deceit. It appears more likely that there was a charasmatic Rabbi/preacher called Yeshua at the core of the movement, and the mythology grew with time and re-telling.

We have examples of that sort of thing in India with Gurus and holy men, Jones and Koresh in the US....but of course, we live in different times.

 

[DBT]

Aren't there several independent references to Paul and his mission? Clement, Ignatius, Eusebius, etc....?

There are several independent references to Batman.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Batman_creators

Clement, et al, had no apparent reason to make up a 'Paul' to justify a Jesus fabrication. How far can this web of conspiracy go, that Clement and the rest were also fabrications? That whoever fabricated Jesus, Paul, Clement, Ignatius, Eusebius, et al, is someone elses fabrication? Where does it stop? Solipsism?

 

[Unknown Soldier]

If you really thought that I'm a bot, then we'd have a serious problem on our hands.

You might have a problem. It certainly wouldn't be a problem for me.

I suppose you're right, there. After all, we have people pushing carts down the street talking to themselves, and they live on just fine.

So getting back to the OP, we know Paul existed and was one of the first Christians.

No. We definitely do not "know" that. Despite your insistence that you know stuff about ancient people and events. Stuff you cannot possibly know.

Who wrote the epistle to the Romans? Are you saying I cannot know who the writer is because it may have been a bot?

And you have a way of demonstrating that you don't know as much as you believe you do, by asserting things like "There's a collection of writings attributed to an ancient guy. Therefore he must have existed."

And your alternate explanation is that a bot wrote those documents.

 

[TomC]

How far do we go with the argument for mythology...

I sure can't answer that.

I have ideas about what is most plausible. That's mostly it.

Something happened. The world's biggest religion ever developed.

"Pure myth" doesn't seem plausible to me. "The Gospels are literal truth" even less plausible.
It's entertaining to discuss all the in between ideas and hypothesis and epic stories. But not much more than entertaining. It's not terribly important, at least not to me.
Tom

 

[TomC]

And your alternate explanation is that a bot wrote those documents.

Do you not read my posts further than it takes for you to be offended?

That's what it looks like to me.
Tom

 

[bilby]

Aren't there several independent references to Paul and his mission? Clement, Ignatius, Eusebius, etc....?

There are several independent references to Batman.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Batman_creators

Clement, et al, had no apparent reason to make up a 'Paul' to justify a Jesus fabrication. How far can this web of conspiracy go, that Clement and the rest were also fabrications? That whoever fabricated Jesus, Paul, Clement, Ignatius, Eusebius, et al, is someone elses fabrication? Where does it stop? Solipsism?

It stops at the point where we accept that it's all speculation. We know basically bugger all about the people of the first century CE, unless they left significant archaeological evidence, which very few did; Certainly not Jesus, who frankly could have been pure fiction, or based on a real person, but who either way didn't perform miracles or rise from the dead.

For the rest, anyone unwilling to accept the bleeding obvious fact that they don't KNOW, cannot be trusted to reach useful conclusions.

The fact remains that not only can we not know whether either Paul or Jesus were real; I also doesn't matter one whit to anything in the modern world other than being a trivial contribution to the counterfactual beliefs of around a billion people who call themselves Christians, most of whom are in rabid disagreement about almost everything with most of the other Christians, much less the rest of humanity.

Wasting one's time on drivel is a perfectly good choice for an adult to make in a free society, but we shouldn't condone their wish to inspire others, particularly impressionable children, to similarly waste any part of their lives on this crap.

The Jesus stories have been done to fucking death. It's time to move on to something more interesting. We've wasted over a millennium of the best minds in history on this nonsensical trivia about a set of tall tales. How about maybe we stop doing that now?

 

[TomC]

It stops at the point where we accept that it's all speculation.

That's the bottom line.

The very fact that the Gospels describe big events that ought to have left something resembling a mark on humanity and history, but don't, is sufficient evidence to me that Christianity isn't based on history so much as people's agendas and story telling abilities. People who came after Jesus(or whatever His name is, it certainly wasn't Jesus).
Tom

 

[Unknown Soldier]

Do we have Miss Eyre's letters? Hint: Quoting a passage in a work of fiction doesn't count as a letter from Miss Eyre.

Do we have Paul's letters?

Yes. We sure do have them in the canon of the New Testament. Here's a copy of some of those letters that goes back eighteen centuries: Papyrus 46. Observe that this letter does not appear in a work of fiction.

Hint: Quoting a passage in a work of fiction doesn't count as a letter from Paul.

That's no problem. See the link above.

How do you know that Corinthians isn't fiction? It's "widely believed" not to be; It might well not be. But then, the same is true of the Loch Ness Monster.

You keep confusing the issues: The issue isn't if what Paul wrote was or was not fiction but if Paul existed to wrote those letters.

We don't know enough to have a usable opinion...

We sure do know Paul wrote some of the epistles like we know Herman Melville wrote Moby Dick.

Or are you a Herman-Melville denier?

Note that I am not asserting that Paul (or Nessie) are or were not real; I am simply pointing out the unavoidable fact that nobody knows. Including you.

I know that only people write letters. If there is a letter, then there is or was a person who wrote that letter.

Dear Unknown Soldier,

I hope this finds you well.

I am writing to warn you that people make shit up. It's one of the defining characteristics of humanity. How anyone could reach adulthood without having an innate distrust of stuff that is written down is beyond me.

Yours sincerely,

Paul.

Wow! Another real letter from Paul!!

Where--where did that come from? I can see little black marks on my screen! I cannot know if a person wrote that.

Which of your criteria for being real does it contravene?

It looks "real" to me. The issue is whether or not a person exists who created it. Some things we just cannot know!

 

[TomC]

We sure do have them in the canon of the New Testament.

Wait wait...
The canon of the New Testament is the documents that some Romans decided to declare "magically true". Mainly because those documents supported the Creed they had decided was "True Christianity". The Creed hammered out by the employees of a Roman warlord, Emperor Constantine.

Everything else was consigned to oblivion.

This all happened centuries after Paul's death.

Jesus lost. The Romans won. Again.
That's the way I see it.
Tom

 

[Unknown Soldier]

We sure do have them in the canon of the New Testament.

Wait wait...
The canon of the New Testament is the documents that some Romans decided to declare "magically true". Mainly because those documents supported the Creed they had decided was "True Christianity". The Creed hammered out by the employees of a Roman warlord, Emperor Constantine.

It wasn't the Romans who decided the canon of the New Testament. It was actually Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria.

Anyway, whether or not documents are considered to be "magically true" is beside the point. We are debating authorship, not content.

This all happened centuries after Paul's death.

But how do you know Paul even existed? We don't know if any person existed to write those epistles! LOL

 

[atrib]

One explanation, that I find somewhat plausible, for the Resurrection stories is that Jesus didn't die on the cross. He was condemned to death on a cross by Pilate, but it didn't happen. His followers would need to explain why people saw Him later. So, they made up something about a supernatural event.

Or, the entire account of Jesus dying on the cross, being resurrected, and then meeting his followers before floating off into the sky is a work of fiction. It is the simplest explanation, and requires us to assume very little to frame the premises supporting the hypothesis as to how the story originated. And that is assuming that the Jesus Paul was referring to was a real, flesh and blood human, instead of a spiritual creature he saw in his visions. And also assuming Paul existed, that the writings ascribed to him were penned by him, and that he sincerely believed what he wrote.

 

[TomC]

Or, the entire account of Jesus dying on the cross, being resurrected, and then meeting his followers before floating off into the sky is a work of fiction.

Then the questions become, "Why bother telling the story? How did this religion become so dominant? Who told the stories, and what did it get them?"

I'm not claiming to have answers.

I also don't think the answers are in the legend/myth. The answers are in the Message. What was it about Christianity(not the modern Greco-Roman myth, the original Christianity*) that endured and grew so much that Constantine convened the Council of Nicea?

It's a completely different question.
Tom

* What I generally refer to as The Jesus Movement for lack of a better term

 

[bilby]

Then the questions become, "Why bother telling the story?

Because it turned out to be a path to wealth and/or power.

How did this religion become so dominant?

Because it got lucky. If this one hadn't, you would be asking the same question about the one that had.

Who told the stories, and what did it get them?"

These guys seem to have done pretty well out of it:




There's a ton of money and power available to people who are prepared to promulgate bullshit. Some might even believe it themselves, which can't hurt their sales pitches.

 

[DBT]

Aren't there several independent references to Paul and his mission? Clement, Ignatius, Eusebius, etc....?

There are several independent references to Batman.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Batman_creators

Clement, et al, had no apparent reason to make up a 'Paul' to justify a Jesus fabrication. How far can this web of conspiracy go, that Clement and the rest were also fabrications? That whoever fabricated Jesus, Paul, Clement, Ignatius, Eusebius, et al, is someone elses fabrication? Where does it stop? Solipsism?

It stops at the point where we accept that it's all speculation. We know basically bugger all about the people of the first century CE, unless they left significant archaeological evidence, which very few did; Certainly not Jesus, who frankly could have been pure fiction, or based on a real person, but who either way didn't perform miracles or rise from the dead.

For the rest, anyone unwilling to accept the bleeding obvious fact that they don't KNOW, cannot be trusted to reach useful conclusions.

The fact remains that not only can we not know whether either Paul or Jesus were real; I also doesn't matter one whit to anything in the modern world other than being a trivial contribution to the counterfactual beliefs of around a billion people who call themselves Christians, most of whom are in rabid disagreement about almost everything with most of the other Christians, much less the rest of humanity.

Wasting one's time on drivel is a perfectly good choice for an adult to make in a free society, but we shouldn't condone their wish to inspire others, particularly impressionable children, to similarly waste any part of their lives on this crap.

The Jesus stories have been done to fucking death. It's time to move on to something more interesting. We've wasted over a millennium of the best minds in history on this nonsensical trivia about a set of tall tales. How about maybe we stop doing that now?

Yet here we are.

 

[Unknown Soldier]

And I have already given the correct answer in earlier threads!

What was the question? I assume you mean whether or not Paul created Jesus.

While the Gospels are often dated to circa 90 AD or even later...

Most scholars date Mark as the earliest Gospel written about 70 CE. The other three Gospels were supposedly written decades later, John being the latest written in the early second century CE.

...in fact there were antecedent texts (including an early John, a hypothetical "Q" and possibly an early Mark) that were closer in time to Paul's writings.

That's commonly accepted.

Yet the Gospels never mention Paul, and Paul ignores almost all the stories in the Gospels. If these Jesuses were invented, they were TWO different inventions. (The Christ Mythicists at IIDB would agree with this, I think, perhaps positing three or more legendary Jesuses or inventions.)

Yes, there are at least two versions of the mythical Christ: Paul's "sky-bound" Jesus and a later "down to earth" Jesus. The two can be thought of as two versions of the same legendary figure.

The earliest evidence we have for Christianity is Paul's letters which have been dated to about 50 CE. Unlike the Gospel writers, Paul says almost nothing about a Jesus living on earth. Paul's Jesus only speaks in visions and revelations. Could it be that Paul created a celestial Jesus only to have the Gospel writers historicize Jesus decades later? Obviously, if Jesus never existed as a real man, then somebody else had to set the wheels of Christianity in motion. Paul, I submit, is the most likely candidate as the creator of Christ and Christianity.

I'm not sure what the reddened clause means. Does 'historicize' here mean 'invent'?

No. To historicize is to place something or somebody into history. So the Jesus-myth-hypothesis is commonly understood as Jesus being created and later placed into time and space in fictional stories.

I agree that much — BUT NOT ALL — of the Gospels were invented but that the earliest (non-surviving) Gospels predate the Fall of Jerusalem and were roughly contemporaneous with Paul's writings. (Paul mentions Simon Peter and his presence in Rome IIRC.)

That's an interesting point. I don't know of any Gospels that date that early.

A key fact which leads almost inevitably to the realization that there was a single historic Jesus is that James is mentioned as the Christ's brother INDEPENDENTLY in THREE sources: (1) Paul in Galatians, (2) Josephus in Antiquities, and (3) "Mark" in the same-named Gospel ("Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and ... ")

I think that at least Paul's James was a real person who did go by the title, "Brother of the Lord." Note that this James is never called Jesus's brother, at least not by Paul. It seems unlikely to me that brotherhood in this context is biological. After all, how many people call themselves "Brother of the Lord" meaning that they ate at the same breakfast table as the Lord did?

There are various other arguments for historicity, but just the James/Jesus brothership by itself reduces the mythicists to blither and babble.

I must disagree. The mythicist hypothesis seems alive and well and gaining ground. Carrier's latest book Jesus from Outer Space really lays out the weaknesses in the historicist view of Jesus. I agree with Carrier that James's title "brother of the Lord" is too vague to tell if Paul was saying that this James was the biological brother of Jesus. If that's what Paul did mean, then Paul was not following Jesus's view that

"...whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”
Matthew 12:50

It's odd that Paul would break with the teachings of a historical Jesus on this issue, don't you think? Jesus downplayed blood-brotherhood only to have Paul up-play it later with no explanation for the change from Paul.

I think Jesus was based on a real person.

Ding ding ding! Excreationist wins the thread.

I didn't know that the game clock ran down.

...
Some atheists say the appearance to the 500 involved a mass hallucination. I think it was a case of mistaken identity - after all a similar thing happened involving thousands of people:

The original Gospel of Mark — probably the earliest Gospel excepting "Q" and perhaps John — barely mentions the Resurrection while that's all Paul wants to talk about! I think Jesusism (Christianity) developed very early and almost immediately split into two (or more) camps.

It does appear that there were two factions early on: One worshipping a celestial Jesus and the other opting for the earthly Jesus. The two views were later conjoined.

 

[TomC]

Because it turned out to be a path to wealth and/or power.

Well sure.
Starting around the 4th century.

What about before that? Centuries before that?
And why not some more plausible religious nonsense?

Honestly, the bizarre combination of Judaism and Greek mythology doesn't look to me like a big winner in the 2nd century. I think it was about the Message. That's what kept Christianity growing.

Once Christianity became a tool of the state the Roman Christian elite dumped that "What you do for the Least, you do for Me" stuff.

Like I've said many times. I don't think Jesus would even recognize Christianity, much less own it.
Tom

 

[atrib]

Or, the entire account of Jesus dying on the cross, being resurrected, and then meeting his followers before floating off into the sky is a work of fiction.

Then the questions become, "Why bother telling the story? How did this religion become so dominant? Who told the stories, and what did it get them?"

I'm not claiming to have answers.

I also don't think the answers are in the legend/myth. The answers are in the Message. What was it about Christianity(not the modern Greco-Roman myth, the original Christianity*) that endured and grew so much that Constantine convened the Council of Nicea?

It's a completely different question.
Tom

* What I generally refer to as The Jesus Movement for lack of a better term

This is the classic argument from ignorance. You believe the story to be plausible because you cannot come up with any other explanation that can explain the existence of the story, and the growth of the religion, other than the story being founded on real factual events. However, other explanations exist, and I have stated why I tend to favor a simpler explanation, and for the reasons that were presented in my post, the portions that you so casually ignored.

Why bother telling the story of Ganesha, the elephant headed god? How did the Hindu religion become so dominant? Who told these stories and what did it get them? Following your logic, we should also believe that the story of Ganesha is also founded on actual events. Do you see the problem here?

 

[excreationist]

About whether Paul wrote the letters that claim were written by him:

The atheist and anti-mythicist Bart Ehrman wrote "Forged: Writing in the Name of God – Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are"

Forged (book) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

This is also mentioned here:

Authorship of the Pauline epistles - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Where about half of the letters are disputed....