Did Paul hijack Christianity?

Great Debates
121

Speak for yourself, please.

It is also the view of people like Burton Mack and Robert Price and quite a few others. Doherty’s new book incorporates material from them and many others and makes takes The Jesus Puzzle ten times farther and ten times forensically tighter and leaves not one counter-argument unrefuted (in my view, of course, since I cannot speak for others).

The mythicist position is trivially easy to refute: Just produce one – even just one – solid piece of evidence for a historical Jesus and that’s it. But no one has succeeded. People who scoff at the mythicist position simply are not aware of its strength and the extreme weakness of the historicist position. If Jesus had been a historical person, there would be clear evidence. When you look, the evidence which must be present if Jesus had been a historical figure simply isn’t there. The absence of evidence in these situations is evidence of absence.

Those are words which do not impress me, and I don’t understand why they impress you, Dio. You are committing the argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy by recklessly shifting the burden of proof. It is not up to skeptics to “disprove” Jesus’ historicity, it is up to the historicists to prove Jesus was a historical person. And not only does nothing come close, as I said above there must be historical evidence if he did live which simply isn’t there.

And the reason the academic view is overwhelmingly in favor of historicity is because that’s what they got into academia to study in the first place! If they admitted there was nothing to study, they make themselves out to be useless fools. There’s enormous social momentum to keep the ball rolling towards a paycheck and keeping your name among the mutual admiration societies.

I agree that that’s the strongest bit of evidence. That’s why I’m a mythicist!

What your and a great many others’ pro-historicist arguments depend on is the English translations of the New Testament. Not one of the original documents have survived (even the oldest have been transcribed from earlier ones), which is not infrequently a much more serious problem than most people imagine (see, for just one example, a layman’s level book on the subject: Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why)

In any case, if you look at the closest we have to the original documents and compare them with the various English translations, one can easily see that some extremely important distinctions, such as those between shades of meaning within the array of the terms’ synonyms, have been, as they say, “lost in translation”. But we’ll just stick with the issue before us for now.

In the earliest copies we have of Paul’s writings, he frequently uses the Greek word “adelphos”. This is translated into English as “brother”, but, alas, that’s one of those things lost in translation, for “adelphos” was the very same word Paul (and a great many other members of the early Christian community) used every time to refer to any member of a Christian group. So, while Paul in Galatians refers to James as the Lord’s “adelphos”, only in English translation can Paul’s personal usage of this 1’st century Greek term be conflated with a biological sibling.

Another vital element to proper understanding of Paul’s usage of the term “adelphos” is that Paul was arguably the most brilliant philosophical, theological, and literary synthesizer of the era. Few greater such geniuses ever lived. It is quite impossible to believe that Christianity would still exist if it were not for Paul’s extraordinary philo-theo-literary skills and talents.

One of Paul’s many goals was (in the ahistoricist view) to synthesize the Qumanian Jesus legends in with the best of the mind-bogglingly diverse philosophical and religious beliefs of the astonishingly cosmopolitan Jewish, Greek, Roman and other communities merged together in many of the cities in Paul’s world. One of these, the so-called “Mystery Cults” (the gnostics and so on) of the day, had already adopted the term “adelphos” to refer to initiates of those gnostic and other mystery cults. So Paul brought that meaning of the word into his writings, too.

In 1 Corinthians 1:1, Sosthenes is called adelphos, and in Colossians 1:1, so is Timothy. And in Corinthians 15:6, 500 adelphos receive a spiritual vision of the Christ. Are they biological siblings of Jesus? Of course not.

So when we encounter the English phrase “James, the brother of the Lord” in Galatians 1:19 and recognize that Paul once again used the term “adelphos”, it is foolish to contend that Paul meant that James was Jesus’ biological sibling.

Some will object: “Paul does put special emphasis on James and his relationship to the Lord. How do you explain that?”

Like this: James was the head of a Christian community in Jerusalem which focused exclusively on the spiritual Christ, as opposed to Jesus the man. That fact alone should give us great pause in considering James to be the biological sibling of Jesus! In any case, this group called themselves the “Adelphos of (or “in”) the Lord”. The leader of this group, whomever he or she was at any specific time (early Christians saw no problem with women leaders, to their great credit), was given the official title that was translated into English as “The brother of the Lord”. It was an honorary title, not a description of a biological sibling relationship to Jesus the man.

That last is also made clear by the references to “the Lord” rather than to “Jesus”.

But what of the writings of others beside Paul? What are we to make of their references to James?

Let’s look at epistle named for him. While no knowledgeable biblical scholar still believes that this is a genuine Pauline (or even Jamesian (sorry, can’t remember the proper English term)) epistle, it is instructive to look at the opening line, which reads in English: “James, a Servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ…” If James was thought by the author to be in fact the biological brother of Jesus the man, why is he referred to there as the Lord Jesus Christ’s “servant” and not even his brother or adelphos at all?

And then let’s look at the epistle of Jude. That opens by describing Jude as “a servant of Jesus Christ, and a brother of James”. While the Gospel of Mark, chapter 6, identifies Jude as the “brother” of Jesus (implying that both Jude and James are the biological siblings of Jesus), had they been thought to be so in Paul’s day 20 years or so before Mark was written, why not describe them as such?. There were great differences in the beliefs and teachings of Christ, the Lord, among the early Christian communities (as Paul’s genuine epistles abundantly documents), and there would be no better way to bring more order to all the massive disorder than for a true biological sibling of Jesus the man to be clearly identified as a primary authority.

No such figure is ever identified by anyone in the early Christian world. Even if such a person was reluctant to exert any authority or even receive praise, he or she would have been identified anyway, since someone else would claim authority by proxy by dint of his friendship with Jesus or with one or more of Jesus’ biological siblings.

Never happened.

This is one of the many things we would see if Jesus were ever a historical, biological figure. The fact that we don’t speaks volumes!
Which bring us to references to Peter/Cephas. Again, we must turn to Paul, for Paul is the single earliest New Testament writer, predating by two decades even the first Gospel to be written, which the largest scholarly consensus identifies as Mark and dates to 70 AD.

Paul refers to Cephas as an “apostle” (though only once), as do the canonical Gospels. But the Gospel’s “apostles” are a group of twelve men, and that Cephas/Peter was one of them. How does Paul refer to the “apostle” Cephas?

He refers in 1 Corinthians 15:5-7 to a group who had a vision of The Christ (not Jesus the man), and writes that “… he was seen by Cephas, and afterward by the Twelve … then he was seen by James and afterward by all the apostles”.

This tells us that although the vision was reportedly seen by Cephas, he was not one of “the Twelve”, and further that there were more “apostles” than just “the Twelve”. Bottom line, Cephas was not one of a group of twelve apostles but was instead just one of a large group of many apostles. Thus, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, “Cephas was just this guy, you know?” There’s no credible reason at all to think that Cephas ever knew Jesus the man. So the fact that Cephas is, at least 30 years later, referred to in the Gospel of Matthew as the “rock” upon which Christ will build “His Church”, it’s abundantly clear that either this Cephas is fictional (as is Jesus) or Matthew’s Cephas and astorian’s Peter are not the same guy.

This is further revealed by all the bitter disputes between Paul and Cephus and many of the rest of the “apostles”, including “the Twelve”, the title given to a more “special” group of the many “apostles” (note that Paul insists that he was an apostle, too, though he never knew Jesus either). Both the title “apostle” and the title “the Twelve” are, again, honorary titles rather than descriptive ones (think of them in light of the special group of twelve Mormon “apostles”, for example). Because if “the Twelve” were actually the direct followers of a biological Jesus (as a literal reading of the Gospels would have it), who would dare argue with such holy personages and criticize them as forcefully as Paul so often did?

Suffice to say that if any of the apostles or “the Twelve” were the direct followers of a biological man, we’d have strong evidence of their biological/biographical existence, too. And we don’t.

Conclusion: References to James or to Peter/Cephas provide no evidentiary support for the existence of a historical, biological Jesus.

122

I can do a more detailed response l;ater, but because I’m watching the Oscars right now I just have a couple of brief things to say.

  1. I am familiar with all the mythicists you mentioned. What I referenced as being particular to Doherty is the “middle sphere” hypothesis.

  2. I am presentlyy agnostic on the question of Jesus’ histority. I don’t think it’s possible to be definitive either way. I was not especially advocating in favor of historicity, just stating it was still the mainstream view and giving the strongest reason as to why.

  3. I am not dependant on English translations. I actually can read Greek.

123

Yes, the mythic view is the minority view. As I explained above to Dio, that’s far more for religious and social reasons than forensic ones. Christian believers vastly outnumber skeptics in the field, so why it should surprise anyone that the skeptical view is in the minority quite escapes me.

And considering the rest of what I wrote to Dio above, not only is there no reason to believe that Paul knew or believed that Jesus was a historical person, there’s strong evidence that he did not believe Jesus was historical! Or at least he didn’t have any idea where or when Jesus might have lived or who his relatives might have been.

Why?

Read Paul’s account of his visit to Cephas and the other “apostles” (who definitely weren’t “the twelve” who allegedly accompanied Jesus) in Jerusalem. Read it carefully and wonder with me…

Let’s say you’re living in 50 CE, a scant couple of decades after Jesus died so horribly in Jerusalem, and the ruckus he is said to have made. Even if you exclude the miracles such as the solar eclipse and all the earthquakes and all that, what he did to the money changers in THE Temple would not be soon forgotten. All in all, the place where God died would be pretty close to the top of the Tourist Trap of All Time.

So why doesn’t Paul write – in prosaic or rapturous words – of visiting Gethsemane? Of reading Jesus’ trial transcript? Of trying to track down witnesses? Of visiting any ostensibly sacred spot or personage?

But he doesn’t! Not a word!

I submit that it’s absolutely impossible that Paul believed that Jesus was a historical person who lived and died in Jerusalem. I submit that it’s absolutely impossible that Paul believed that Peter/Cephas and the other “apostles” in Jerusalem (recall that Paul insisted quite adamantly that he was an apostle, too!) were among the twelve who traveled with Jesus, else he would never have dared argue with them as vehemently as he did. Who would dare question Jesus’ right-hand men?

No, everything in Paul – if understood in the idiom and context of the time – practically screams that Paul had no idea who Jesus might have been, where he might have lived, or who he might have been related to. Paul is argument one against the historicist position, especially since he was the first to write anything about this totally unknown maybe human / maybe spiritual-only Jesus. Read objectively, Paul is telling us that he believed Jesus existed only on some spiritual plane, which is why he never bothered looking for his traces in and about Jerusalem.

124

Okay. Yes, Doherty may well have originated that line of thought.

I understand that, too. You and I have discussed this before, and it is clear that your knowledge of this topic is very strong, which was why I was surprised to see you bring up the James/Jesus brother thing. That’s the strongest evidence, but it’s extremely weak at best.

I knew that, too. I cannot read Greek, though I’ve debated this with others who are gifted in the Koine Greek of that era and won many of them over between myself and Mack, Doherty, and Price.

If I reliably had time to do it, I’d like to start a new GD thread on the topic, but I spend so much time in the hospital I just can’t tell when I might have time to dedicate to it…

125

ambushed, I’ve read all three of Doherty, Mack and Price. The first, of course, is famously mythicist. The latter two, though, I would describe as agnostic on historicity. In particular, I recall Price’s position to be that Jesus may have been a historical person, but the story has been so layered with legends that it’s impossible to say what the facts of the matter are. OTOH, my reading on the subject is something like eight years stale at this point, so maybe they’ve gone further since. Could you please cite (and, if you have the time, quote) where Mack and Price have cleaved to the mythicist position? FWIW, I don’t think this is a hijack of the OP. On the contrary, IMHO, it’s perfectly germaine.

126

The OP finds the “hijack” very interesting. By all means go ahead.

127

I find this incredibly unconvincing for two reasons.
1 It’s a mistake to assume Paul as an individual would make those things a priority and then draw any conclusion from that.
2 we can be fairly sure we only have a portion of Paul’s writings selected by other men for their own agenda.

A weak argument. Paul claims to have met Jesus spiritually on the road to Damascus. It makes sense that he might consider his experience and his calling, every bit as authoritative as those who walked with Jesus before the crucifixion.
We simply don’t know if Jesus really lived or not. You’re welcome to your opinion but that’s all it is.

128

How’s this for evidence. I’ve got four biographies of Jesus all written within living memory of his lifetime, the earliest written within 35-40 years of his lifetime. In addition, I’ve got a large collection a letters written about his life and deeds on earth, some of those letters written within 10-15 years of his lifetime and containing creeds written within 2-8 years of his lifetime. So here’s a simple question: can you name any person from the ancient world for whom we have such a huge collection of different writings from different writers all dedicated to that one person and written within their lifetime? Historians would kill to have that type of historical record for nearly anybody else from ancient times. Or let’s put it this way. Do you believe that Siddhartha Gautama (aka the Buddha) existed? Nothing was written about him within 200 years of his death, perhaps not within 300 years. Do you believe that Socrates existed? How many different accounts by different authors do we have of his life? How about Anaximander? Even if we take a figure like Themistocles who’s at the center of well-documented historical events, we’re still working with much less source material than what we have for Jesus. Clearly if we used the same standards for Jesus that we use for other ancient historical figures, the life story of Jesus would be one of the firmest life stories we have from the ancient world. The mythicist position depends on making up a completely arbitrary approach for Jesus that has nothing in common with the techniques that real ancient historians use.

Once again, are you willing to apply this argument to all ancient history, or only to Jesus? You complain that we don’t have the original manuscripts of the New Testament? Well we don’t have the original manuscripts of any ancient book. Are you willing to therefore throw out all ancient history? What we do have for the New Testament is far more manuscripts dating from far closer to the event than for any other ancient work. We have fragments of the New Testament from the early 2nd century and complete books from around 200. By contrast, when you look at well-known ancient authors like Plato, Aristotle, and Herodotus, you’re dealing with manuscripts from at least a thousand years after when they were written. So if we applied your standard, there simply wouldn’t be any ancient history at all.

(By the way, I have read Misquoting Jesus and it doesn’t support your position at all. Dr. Ehrman simply writes under the assumption that the gospels are a largely accurate record of the life of Jesus while focusing on a few words and short passages that might have been altered.)

129

uh huh. There’s no indication that those writings had any intention of providing a historically accurate representation of an actual person. In fact given their content, there’s plenty of reason to be skeptical.

really. Which would those be?

You’re using the term “historical record” rather loosely.
Finding writings about a religious figure written by his followers contain an automatic question mark. I’d like to believe Jesus actually existed but I’m forced to admit I can’t really know with certainty. That doesn’t change the value of the teachings attributed to him.

I’ve read that book and others by Ehrman. If you can find any claim he makes that the gospels are a largely accurate account I’d like to see it. I doubt it exists. I’d agree that Misquoting Jesus does not support the idea that Jesus never existed. He simply talks about the scholarly details of the history of the scriptures and stresses the fact that the writings we do have contain so many differences, and we don’t have the originals to really know what the author actually said.
As much as I remember, he leaves the question of Jesus existence for another time and doesn’t really approach it.

130

None of them written by anyone who ever knew Jesus, or knew anyone else who knew Jesus. They also are not independent. Matthew and Luke both copy from Mark, as well as Q. All four Gospels are also filled with factual inaccuracies, historical errors or falsehoods, irreconcilable contradictions and demonstrable fictions. In terms of genre, they are not even intended as history or biography. They are liturgical works.

You don’t know ehen the “creeds” were written. Seven of Paul’s letters are generally accepted as authentic. Every other epsitle in the NT is pseudoepigraphical and late. Paul’s authentic letters say virtually nothing about Jesus’ actual life, do not quote him (except for a eucharistic formula which paul implies he learned by revelation), shows no awareness of things like the Virgin Birth and the empty tomb, does not mention any miracles except for the resurrection (and even on that point, Paul is decidly vague, not claiming a physical resurrection from a tomb, but just that Jesus has ‘appeared" to people after his death), and not telling any anecdotes from Jesus’ life. Paul’s letters are not especially helpful with telling us anything about Jesus life.

We have nothing from Jesus’ life time, but the answer to your question is that we have any number of things written about various rulers of Egypt, Persia, Rome and others. We have Julius Caesar’s own diary, for example. we have nothing whatsoever for Jesus.

There is no contemporary historical record of Jesus.

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Or let’s put it this way. Do you believe that Siddhartha Gautama (aka the Buddha) existed? Nothing was written about him within 200 years of his death, perhaps not within 300 years.
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The actual existence of a hitorical Siddharth cannot be verified, that is correct. That is not evidence for a Historical Jesus, though, so who cares?

At last two from his lifetime. Plato and Aristophanes. That’s two more than we have for Jesus.

Frankly, you have not demonstrated that you have any familiarity at all with the techniques that real historians use.

This is actually not a complaint or a “double-standard.” Historians do not accept textual evdience, all by itself, as proof of anything, but beyond that, even if we had the autopgraphs for the books of the NT, they would still not help the case for historicity (at least, not unless the content of the autographs was radically different from all extant manuscript copies), because they were not written by witnesses or contemporaries, and they are still filled with the same factual errors, contradictions and fictions. An autograph manuscript of Matthew (while any autograph manuscript for any book of the Bible would be an incredibly signifacant and amazing find) would no more firm up a case for the historical accuracy of its claims any more than a discovery of an autograph of The Odyssey would make a case for the historicity of the cyclops. No one (at least no one with any sense) tries to argue that not having autograph manuscripts of the Gospels is a per se argument against the historicity of their claims. That’s a straw man. Nobody says that.

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What we do have for the New Testament is far more manuscripts dating from far closer to the event than for any other ancient work.
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This is simply bullshit, number one, and meaningless, number two. The number of times a story is copied des not make the story any more likely to be true.

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We have fragments of the New Testament from the early 2nd century
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No we don’t.

This is not a standard applied by anybody.

Ehrman does not come close to making this assumption. Ehrman is not a mythicist. he believes Jesus existed, but he does nor believe the Gospels are accurate records of his life, and has written entire books saying so.

131

Actually, there is an existing fragment of John, the Rylands Library Papyrus, P52, which might be from as early as 125. Also, P90 and P104 (part of John and part of Matthew, respectively) also date from that period.

I’m not aware of any full existing Gospel text earlier than the Codex Vaticanus, though, but I think what the other poster was talking about was P66, which dates from around 200, and contains an awful lot of John.

132

Thats all good information. It just can’t be realistically used to support the conclusions ITR made about historical Jesus.

133

I screwed up my coding in that post. I acknowledged P52 myself (that was me that said we have a fragment from John, even though I accidentally put it in quote tags). My “no we don’t” remark was addressed only to the claim about having a complete manuscript for anything in the NT in 200. We have a number of partials, but we don’t have a complete manuscript for any NT books until the 4th Century.

134

Why? There’s no reason to believe that writings about a religious figure are less likely to be accurate than writings about a non-religious figure.

I don’t have a copy with me right now and am not going to bother checking one out. What I recall from reading the book is that the actual discussion of textual variants would generally go like this. He’d present a situation where some manuscripts say “Jesus said ‘blah blah blah blah blah blah A blah blah blah’” while others say “Jesus said ‘blah blah blah blah blah blah B blah blah blah’”. Then Ehrman would comment that we can’t really know whether Jesus actually said ‘blah blah blah blah blah blah B blah blah blah’ or ‘blah blah blah blah blah blah B blah blah blah’", but it would be presented in a way that only made sense if Ehrman believed that most of the passage was genuine. In any case, I only mentioned that to address ambushed’s attempt to revive the ‘OMG we don’t have the original manuscripts!!!’ line.

135

I think the bigger problem being that the account’s from their followers. Not exactly unbiased sources. Accounts from known enemies would be dubious as well.

Putting aside that many religiuos leaders and prominent religious figures historically have made claims of abilities to their followers that weren’t actually true. Or do you think the oracles at delphi could really make predictions?

136

There is reason to believe that anything written by someone with a vested interest is less likely to be accurate than if the author is disinterested.

Moreover, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and claims of the “miraculous” (i.e the physically impossible) are automatically extremely unlikely (to put it charitably) to be true, no matter who said it, or who they said it about.

There are contemporary claims, and even an eyewitness acount (none of which we have for Jesus) of the Emporor Vespasian miraculously healing people. Nobody buys that claim either, even though it’s technically much better attested than for any miraculous claims made about Jesus.
Even something written without an agenda should not be automatically afforded uncritical credibility, and in fact, it never is. Why do you want to make a special exception for claims made about Jesus that can’t even meet the basic standards of not making impossible assertions? And that’s leaving aside the fact that they are further hampered by not being primary or secondary accounts, not having any primary or secondary sources and being filled with demonstable factual error and contradiction?

Trust me. Ehrman does not believe the Gospel accounts are accurate. He’s written entire books saying they aren’t. If he doesn’t talk much about it in Misquoting Jesus, it’s only because that wasn’t the topic of the book.

Ehrman definitely believes that Jesus existed, but he does not come close to accepting the Gospels as accurate historical accounts. He doesn’t even think Jesus believed himself to be the Messiah.

137

To nitpick, we don’t have complete manuscript for any of the Gospels until the 4th Century, but P46, which can be dated from the end of the 2nd-beginning of the 3rd century, has entire texts of most of the Pauline epistles. The only Pauline epistles that are missing from what’s survived are the beginning and some of the middle of Romans, most of 1 Thess., and all of 2 Thess, 1 and 2 Tim., Titus and Philemon.

Isn’t ** ITR champion**not making special claims about the accuracy of the Gospels, but just saying that the existence of the Gospels is evidence that a historical Jesus existed?

138

Of course there is. Even the so called historic writers of ancient times did not have any commitment to historical accuracy and research. They wrote what they heard. Even non religious writers who sort of mention Jesus are in question.
Those who had a vested interest in promoting his legacy or JC as the son of God crucified and risen from the dead are simply telling a story. We have no real reason to believe they had any intention of being historically accurate and as Dio has pointed out, some were copied from other sources and their authorship is in question.

No, Ehrman is a scholar and was talking about the writing from a researched scholarly pov. There is no implication that he thought any particular passage was genuine. There is “according to writing A Jesus said X but according to writing B Jesus said Y.” The key being “according to” some source rather than any implied " I personally believe Jesus said" It simply isn’t necessary for him to believe they are historically accurate. It could just as easily make sense from a study POV if Ehrman added, “and we don’t really know if he said either” which is the truth.

I think the point was that we don’t really have something written by an eye witness.
from Misquoting Jesus

139

I find a lot of your reasoning suspect and speculative.

Like what? Presumably there were millions of people who lived in Palestine in Jesus’ time for whom we have no evidence. What is this magic evidence that “must” be present if Jesus had been an actual historical figure?

To demonstrate that Jesus did actually exist, historicists must provide evidence. Without evidence, the best that can be said is that maybe he did or didn’t. If you’re going to assert that he definitely did not exist, you’ve assumed a burden of evidence to support your claim.

It’s not foolish. You’ve demonstrated that there are other possible interpretations of this verse, and frankly any Bible student knows this. Even if Paul did not mean biological brother (and we don’t know either way), it is not an argument against historicity.

What is your reasoning for this claim? We don’t have much information about the early Jerusalem church, why do you say they focused exclusively on the spiritual Christ? How do you know?

So what? For the sake of argument, let me stipulate that James was not the biological brother of Jesus (which you haven’t proven). That doesn’t men Jesus was a myth. You still have a Jewish sect in Jerusalem worshiping a person who supposedly existed within their living memory.

You’re putting to much stock in the Brother of Jesus thing. As far as there being “no better way to bring more order to all the massive disorder than for a true biological sibling of Jesus the man to be clearly identified as a primary authority” – you’re imposing your own cultural framework on the early movement. Judaism had no tradition of a “primary authority” to speak on spiritual matters; it makes perfect sense for one not to have existed at the time. They didn’t invent the Roman Catholic Church overnight.

No, not necessarily. You’re not thinking like a first century Jew. What are the other things?

Granted.

Not at all! Referring to Cephas and then the twelve does not imply that Cephas is not one of the twelve. Compare “Yesterday I spent time with my brother, and then my whole family.” Or “today I got caught passing a note to Susie, so I had to read it to the class.” This is in no way evidence that Cephas was not a member of The Twelve. As far as the title “apostle” this was generally applied to anyone who had been a follower of Jesus during his lifetime (later it came to be synonymous with The Twelve + Paul).

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No, it’s not clear at all. In fact it’s quite a stretch.

Paul had a bitter dispute with a fictional person?
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and many of the rest of the “apostles”, including “the Twelve”, the title given to a more “special” group of the many “apostles”
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Yes, Jesus’ closest twelve disciples

He claimed apostleship based on his vision of the risen Christ.

Do you have any evidence of this? No? Didn’t think so.

Apparently, Paul would. He considered himself an equal to the twelve based on his personal vision of Jesus and he was clearly the confrontational type. You can’t just say “Paul wouldn’t dare contradict a disciple of Jesus!” You have no way of knowing that. It’s complete speculation. At least the historicists can point to Paul’s accounts of the disputes as evidence.

No, it doesn’t “suffice to say” that. What kind of evidence would you expect (beyond the limited evidence we do have in the gospels and epistles?) Why would we expect them to leave any evidence at all? The Sanhedrin existed at the time and were much more influential and important; do you have any strong evidence of their biographical existence too?

Even if that were not a very weak argument – you still haven’t shown that Jesus didn’t exist. At best you’ve shown… actually I don’t think you’ve shown anything at all, except maybe that James was not necessarily the biological brother of Jesus. I hope you don’t expect the historical Jesus arguments to topple like a house of cards based on that.

140

In reference to corrobration for James as Jesus’ brothjer, Josephus referred to an execution of James, “the brother of Jesus, the so-called Christ.” Unlike the Testimonium Flavianum (Josephus’ longer description of Jesus), this James reference is not generally believed to be interpolated. Mythicists still say that it is (and I won’t say their arguments for it are completely without merit), but it’s another grain of rice on the scale (along with the TF and Tacitus).

I believe that Doherty also calls some passages from Paul interpolations, and while I don’t want to get into a battle over it (and am neutral over most of it anyway), I do feel like the mythicists can only cry interpolation so many times before it starts to seem a little ad hoc.