Let’s be clear about one thing: we weren’t dancing around this particular bush. Our debate there wasn’t about Jesus. It was about arbitrary and ridiculous standards of identifiability to be applied to persons from a distant era. Please let’s not conflate two vastly different issues.
Using a time machine you go back to find the historical Jesus. What do you think you'll really find?
I’d expect to find the unique incarnate Son of God, so filled with love for people that his charisma drew multitudes to him, so filled with power that he exercised authority over nature and the demonic, so linked to the Father in Heaven that he did nothing on his own but lived in dependence and obedience. I’d expect to encounter the one who walks with me and talks with me, who answers my prayers and guides me. He lived. He lives. And like Job, I know one day I will see my redeemer face to face. How cool is that. Anyway, that’s what I’d expect.
But still you deserve a pat on the head from PRR. And a cookie.
This thread got a lot less contentious once I left.
I’ll just try to post my reasoning cleanly. I make no claims about Jesus being divine. In fact, in my first post in this thread, I said I think ‘philosopher wandering around’ or whatever that choice was was the closest. I also said I thought he probably did some stuff seen as supernatural (but I think they weren’t) - “healing” people by showing them compassion, being there as an epileptic came out of a seizure. That, however, is much less defensible, and just a ‘hunch.’
So, my reasoning, which is clearly not definitive, but
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We accept Paul was a historical figure, and reasonably. He wrote letters which are part of the bible, and are known from before the official bible was decided on. Scholars agree these letters are all from the same hand.
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Paul either believed Jesus was real, or Paul was a gigantic fraud. He devoted his life to spreading Christianity around the Roman Empire.
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Paul himself wrote of meeting Peter (Cephas), James (whom he calls the brother of the Lord), and Barnabas, in Jerusalem in his letter to the Galatians. These are people who the gospels and the book of Acts say knew Jesus (and that James was Jesus’ brother).
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Paul writes constantly of it being ‘the time of Christ.’ It was a ‘this very generation’ thing.
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Paul became a believer in this end-of-days cult. He knew the guys who claimed to have accompanied Jesus. There were lots of people claiming to be the messiah around that time - why would this cult invent one out of nothing?
So I guess I do exclude “the middle,” in a sense. For reasons that I think are reasonable, I reject the hypothesis that Paul was historical, but Jesus was not. But it’s not an omission of thought, as “excluded middle” implies.
Nitpick, but I’m claiming no reliable evidence of their existence, not saying that they absolutely didn’t exist.
That depends on what your definition of “real” is. In a lot of the Christ myth models (notably Earl Doherty’s, for instance), Paul believed Jesus was “real,” but that he existed and had been crucified only in one of the “Heavenly spheres.”
I do not personally find this to be a compelling hypothesis, but I’m mentioning it just to point out that it as at least theoretically possible that Paul believed what he was saying, but was not saying what people now think he was saying.
He could have also just been sincerely wrong. A lot of the people who see Bigfoot really think they saw Bigfoot. “Lying or real” is a false dichotomy. There are great big areas for “honestly mistaken,” and/or “completely misunderstood.”
And not for nothing, but lying is not actually impossible. It is certainly more likely than anything supernatural.
Yes. But I *explicitly *dismissed that, for reasons I stated. I think it gets beyond ‘reasonable doubt’ that Paul believed Jesus walked on earth, but there had been no such person.
Agreed. But I don’t think either is correct.
This is not as secure as you might think. Paul says he met Peter and James and John, yes, but what does he really tell us about their relationship to Jesus? He says Jesus “appeared” to them after the crucifixion, but does not tell us anything about what Jesus said or did before the crucifixion other than to give us an iteration of the Eucharist which cannot be historically true, which was probably derived from pagan mystery cults and which some scholars think might be an interpolation anyway.
Paul also does say that Jesus was “born of a woman,” and “born of the flesh” which are stronger evidence, I think, that Paul thought Jesus had been a real person, but the mythicists have answers to those points too - not great ones, but not absolutely falsifiable ones either.
The evidence for some kind of real historical Jesus is marginally better than for a wholly mythical Jesus, but it’s not apodictically so. It’s not beyond all doubt.
I’m not trying to prove myself right. I’m just arguing about what’s most plausible.
And once again, I think the theory that Jesus was a real person is more plausible than any of the theories you’ve come up with involving conspiracies and aliens.
If Jesus were a real person, he may have been an Essene.
There is a certain amount of tongue in cheekiness to my list, but I still hold that your argument for the existence of Jesus is not as sound as you make it out to be. The fact that you continue to offer the “it’s either true or a giant conspiracy, and a conspiracy is implausible” argument as your sole justification is no more ridiculous than Paul’s writing being that of a man who suffered a neurological accident on the road to Damascus having heard various stories about itinerant preachers in Palestine.
So there’s at least a third possibility that is as plausible as yours.
How else do you explain Paul’s Damascene conversion? He’s either lying, deluded (or afflicted) or something supernatural happened, no?
I think deluded is possible, and I think also reasonably likely is that the conversion as described in Acts didn’t happen.
Paul himself never actually says anything about the Damascus incident. That’s only in the book of Acts, which has multiple and contradictory versions of the story.
Paul never says, in any detail what his experience was, only that Jesus “appeared” to him and gave him his gospel.
Paul also has a story about being taken up to the “Third Heaven,” (actually he tells the story in the third person saying, “I knew a man in Christ,” but it’s generally presumed that Paul is talking about himself), where he says he heard “inexpressable” things, but this is obviously a different sort of experience than the Damascus experience.
Okay, so lets explore the rational explanations for Jesus “appearing” to Paul and the hearing of “inexpressible” things.
Is this definitely after Jesus’ death (or supposed death)? Could he really be talking about a face-to-face meeting with the alive Jesus?
What are the options for the dead Jesus to “appear” to Paul?
Jesus truly was the son of god, died and risen.
Paul had a neurological accident (seizure, CVA, etc)
Paul had a mental illness (schizophrenia, etc)
Paul is lying
Anything else?
I think psychosis or lying about cover it. I dismiss anything genuinely paranormal out of hand.
There are storylines here that require some motivation on the part of Paul that hasn’t yet been supplied.
If Paul invented Christianity out of whole cloth, or if there was a minor Jesus cult that had come to his notice but, despite not having had any sort of religious experience relating to it, Paul decided that he was going to take this little cult and run with it…well, why? As best we know, Paul was a Roman citizen, which presumably meant he was, if not rich, at least doing pretty well. Did he do it for the glamour? The girls? The possibility of death by crucifixion or being fed to lions for the masses’ entertainment? What (either materially or psychologically) was in it for him? And why didn’t he take the cult’s evolution in a direction that didn’t involve conflict with the Roman authorities, and the resulting unpleasant means of death? Obviously, in these scenarios, Paul is a salesman par excellence, but given that fact, you’d think he could have sold a story that was at least slightly safer for him and for his marks. He certainly could have invented a religion that gave at least wiggle room to kneel to Caesar.
Perhaps Paul was Jesus. But his schtick wasn’t working first person, so he decided to make himself the character to talk about. Or perhaps he was one of those guys always referring to himself in the the third person and people just got confused.
Maybe a person who the story is based on lived 100 years earlier and Paul found a scroll detailing the story. He wanted to make it more contemporary so he advanced the timeline and claimed to know the man personally.
Maybe the story is based on a dozen different messiahs who preached in the supposed time of Jesus. Each one having a story full of faults, but Paul consolidated the good parts and attributed them to one person.
Maybe Paul was just so good that he made the whole thing up.
There are many more possible explanations.
Metaphor.
Would come under lying, no?
We can’t just dismiss inconvenient facts as metaphor, or else everything can be hand waved away as metaphor..
What is this “invented Christianity out of whole cloth” bit? No-one thinks that. Not when there was already Judaism, Hellenism, Buddhism and various Mystery Religions floating around in the area. More like “re-purposing”.
What about drugs? Could that be a possibility? Were mind altering drugs in circulation back then and in that place?
Maybe Paul went on a “spiritual” journey of Hashis-assisted self discovery.