About directly meeting Jesus- yes. But most of Pauls writings are letters, and the Acts of the Apostles.
Note that John certainly met Jesus, and “wrote” that Gospel.
And, no one- not even the Romans- cast any doubt that Jesus was a real man in that period. While they still had access to stuff like Pilate’s execution orders, etc. However, after the “Dark Ages” all that’s left of that periods documents could fit on a bookshelf. As** septimus** pointed out, until recently there was no evidence that Pilate existed outside the Gospels and Josephus. Some deniers claimed Pilate was made up, even.
In fact the doubts about the Historic Jesus are quite recent.
There is really no doubt that** a** Jesus existed. Of course, doubting the miracles and some of the odd details the Mathew threw in to make it all work with prophesies is entirely another thing.
There’s actually more evidence of Jesus than Socrates.
I think it would work pretty much like fan fiction today-written by different people at different places at different times, and sometimes about different people altogether, then later these stories are fixed as much as possible to make them “canon”. Some stories have spread too far and wide to be changed to completely fit the established story-thus the differences.
There is exactly one stone that demonstrates Pilate was a real person.
I think sometimes people wildly overestimate how much “hard evidence” exists for anyone from the ancient world. Even people quite important in their own lifetimes, we are lucky to have anything from.
And, it’s broken and part of the inscription has to be inferred. * And*- we’re lucky to have even that.
This does blow apart the common argument that Jesus could not be real as no contemporaneous Roman records mention Him. Mind you, yes, there likely were such records at one time (but not much, mind you). But just about everything is gone.
There is no “common argument that Jesus could not be real”-that’s a strawman, so you’ve blown apart nothing. If there is an argument, it is that there is little to no positive evidence that Jesus existed, and even less that Jesus The Christ The Miracle Worker and Changer Of Water Into Wine and Risen From The Dead ever existed.
Not that he couldn’t, but that he did.
See the difference?
I don’t think that’s established. Can we not state things as fact unless they are very solid?
Why would the Romans fact-check Jesus in real time? I don’t think you are fully getting the fog of war that primitive people lived in.
So what? We have better tools to evaluate things now that we did two thousand years ago, about a preacher 30 years after his death, from the other side of the Empire, in a different language than we speak.
Sure there is doubt. But like most things in religion, we’re expected to give it more latitude than other questions.
Like I’ve said before, these guys aren’t the Jesus of their religions. They’re the Paul. In the analogy you’re making, Jesus is Moroni, he’s Xenu. Is that really the analogy you want to make?
I agree. While recognizing it’s not ironclad proof, what we have makes me think they were basing it on a real guy. One piece of prophecy fulfillment I didn’t see mentioned in this thread is that the Messiah is supposed to have been dead 3 days and then resurrected. Nobody would have *ever *said three days meant “dying on Friday and missing from the tomb by the time anyone showed up Sunday dawn,” until there was a need to do so. That part of the story smacks of desperation, honestly.
If I’m making up a legend, well, this guy Yeshua was killed on Wednesday. He rose from the dead on Shabbat! That’s three days. 72 hours. Not 36. And there were lots of witnesses. His followers were still weeping and moaning near the tomb, where the 12 were keeping a vigil. Then, they heard a voice from the tomb, “Why do you weep? Have I not not told you to have faith?” and the stone rolled away as though of its own accord, and he emerged, all like, “is there someplace within a Sabbath’s walk where we can eat and relax and talk?”
This is “Heads I win-tails, you lose” arguing. If stories match up evenly it’s because they verify each other, but if they don’t match up it’s evidence that they weren’t trying to fake it? Using this line of “reasoning”, what would it take to convince you that a Biblical tale was bullshit?
thats exactly what someone who was really really really good at lies and propaganda would do… never make up a “perfect” lie… fudge enough details to leave and appearance of “reasonable doubt”
I disagree with your analysis. It seems like it’s begging the question; you’re essentially arguing that Jesus the man couldn’t have existed because Jesus the divine being couldn’t have existed. And that’s not true - Jesus certainly could have existed as a human being without being supernatural.
The idea isn’t that he was created out of whole cloth but that one or more communities created a hodgepodge of stories/had a hodgepodge of revelations that needn’t have been mutually consistent with each other, all sort of based on different bits of OT scripture and dealing with different contemporary stuff and so on.
The awkward contortions come about later as people try to synthesize these together, AND come about as a result of people trying to reshape the nascent myth according to their own theological preferences.
Well as said, it’s not a conspiracy that I’m particularly knowledgeable on. (And I doubt that your statement “nobody disputes” is correct. I’m sure that among the nutters there’s at least one exreme nutter.) But accepted. And no interest in debating the topic, here nor in any other location.
