Was Jesus Real, or not?

Great Debates
1

I was visiting a site called the Happy Heretic.
Allow me to elaborate on my question, as discussed in one of Judith’s essays:

Paul is considered to be the founder of Christianity as we know it today, and most biblical scholars agree on this point. These same scholars also agree that Paul’s epistles predate the gospels Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But since the epistles are placed in the Bible AFTER the gospels, we are falsely lead to believe that they were witten after them.

This is all fine, but what does it mean you ask?

It means that the reader is falsely led to believe that the mystical references to salvation in the epistles are referring to Jesus of Nazarath, when that are in fact not. Paul had no earthly concept of Jesus. As far as he was concerned, the Christ did all of his redemptive work in the spiritual realm. To him, Jesus was like the other so-called Gods of the so-called Mystery Cults where spiritual redemption in a spiritual world was quite common. Many of the Mediterranean dieties had similar rituals as those Jesus was claimed to have had.

Mithra (persian god of the 5th century B.C.) for instance was considered the God Of Light. He had a sacred meal that consisted of bread and wine, aided human souls to heaven after death, was born on December 25 as a result of a miracle; shepherds worshipped at his birth; his rites included baptism, and he was to raise the dead and judge humankind at the end of the world.

Consider also Apollonius of Tyana, circa 80-90. He preached the One True God, performed miracles and healings,
cast out demons and raised the dead. He also raised himself from the dead, appeared to his followers, and then made a bodily ascent into heaven.

If you read the New Testament without taking into account the gospels, you are left with no evidence that anyone physical names Jesus had ever lived. Why did Paul not just write the entire life story of Jesus? He was born here to these parents, lived here or there, got educated by whomever, and so on leading up to the eventual death, and subsequent ressurection? We’d expect that at least. Consider how much of Jesus’s life is absent from the N.T. All we are left with is mystical references to old testament quaotations, almost as if Paul had never known there was a physical person, Jesus. Maybe it’s becasue there had not been?
Not just Paul, but the other writes in the epistles failed to mention such things as:

 John the Baptist and Jesus' own baptism
 Mary, virginal or otherwise
 Bethlehem, Nazareth and Galilee
 Jesus working miracles
 Jesus performing healings
 Jerusalem as it relates to Jesus
 Palm Sunday
 Jesus tossing the "traders" out of the Temple
 Peter's denial(s) of Jesus
 Calvary (!)
 Pontius Pilate

How can you preach of the saviour of the world and not mention anything he did? In Hebrews there is not one original quote from Jesus through the whole book. Just Old Testament Quotes.

Why too do the four gospels that supposedly tell the greatest story the wold has ever know differ from one-another so very much, and why were four needed? Why not just one unambiguous book that chronicles everything, rather than poke, prod, and dicipher four different ones to try to figure out what happened?

Anyone else have any thoughts on this at all that you would be willing to share and discuss?

2

It’s true that the earliest Gospels date from roughly 70 AD, which would be 40 years after the death of what you call the “physical Jesus.” However, according to one source:

  • Rick
3

You might want to clarify what you’re trying to say, here. Paul very specifically referred to Jesus dying by crucifixion (and rising from the dead) on several occasions, going so far as to say that if the events did not happen, “our faith is in vain.” Read I Corinthians 15. It very clearly refers to Jesus acting in this world.

There are several threads on the subject of the “reality” of Jesus. I’m not going to look them up at the moment because this topic seems to be rather different than the “search for the historical Jesus” that they usually involve.

As to the challenge that Paul did not simply write a biography of Jesus: Read the letters. They were written to specific communities of people whom Paul had already converted (other than Romans, which was written to a community where he intended to preach). Any delivery of a biography that Paul might have given would have been delivered verbally when he began preaching. The letters were written to people who already knew the story, in an attempt to address specific problems (theological disputes, internal bickering, outside persecution) that they were experiencing. There would have been no point to restating a “Life of Jesus” when the point was to address a different subject that he assumed the audience knew.

(You will also find that there is not unanimity of agreement that Paul “founded” Christianity. It is a widely accepted perspective, but there are many dissenters from that position.)

4

Looking over the OP, again, maybe it is looking for the historical Jesus, so, a few ventures into the topic:

Cecil’s views

The gospel according to “Q”

Did Jesus really live ?

Jesus Christ vs Julius Caesar

Jesus, historical person?

in my last post,

should have been:

There would have been no point to restating a “Life of Jesus” that he assumed the audience knew, when the point was to address a different subject.

(Rewording sentences requires triple proofing.)

5

Actually, it’s not “true”. This date is debated

Even assuming that this “original gospel” would have been written around, you’re here assuming that its unknown content was similar to the text currently known as gospel.
For instance, you’re assuming that it was refering to an actual man who would have lived in palestine (Not to a spiritual being, like the “angelos-christos” appearing in early “christian” writings, for instance), and who was living around 30 (and not before, like the essenian “master of justice” who was executed 50 years or so “before christ”, for instance), and that it was an account of its life (and not a mere “book of wisdom” with quotes, for instance).

IIRC, he refers to the christians, and writes that their name comes from the name of Christ, who, etc…It’s not an evidence that he knew himself that the story was for real. It only proves that at the time Tacitus is writing (100-120, I believe), the christians, or more exactly at least part of them, believed that Christ was a real man who has lived and has been crucified under Pilatus.

Assuming that this part has not been rewritten by zealous christians long time after.

Yes, there has been more than one Jesus : Jesus ben Panthera, Jesus ben Sirah…The original Jesus could have been one of them and the part about his life, death on the cross, etc…added later.

Which doesn’t prove anything

Possibly. But there are other theories : for instance that christian tradition is derivated from the older dositean or nazorean traditions, or that the christ is actually the essenian “master of justice”, or the spiritual angelos-christos of some messianist sects, “humanized” later, etc…or some mixing between several traditions. There are no evidence that someone whose life was roughly similar to what is written in the gospels actually existed.

In fact, AFAIK, the main issue is that the concept of a man called jesus who actually lived seems to be the last one to appear in the “christian” (it wasn’t clearly defined at first) tradition. The oldest “christian” authors seem to be unaware of his existence, which is quite surprising. I believe its the main reason why other explanations for the origins of this myth have been proposed, instead of the most obvious one (there was really a guy named this way, who was crucified and then his followers told he was god, use to make miracles, etc…)

6

Not so much surprising as not accurate.

Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians dates to a period 12 - 20 years after the purported death of Jesus. It makes several references to “the Lord Jesus” and also uses the title “Christ.” What is a bit surprising to people raised in a milieu of 1900+ years of developed Christian theology is his reference to Jesus as separate from God, indicating that the concept of Jesus as God (and, hence, the doctrine of the Trinity) might not have been fully developed or understood in the earliest days of the Church.

There is nothing in I Thessalonians, however, to suggest that Paul was not talking about a real person.

7

cranky wrote:

This is the argument Earl Doherty makes in his on-line (and in-print) book The Jesus Puzzle. (If that link doesn’t work, the website is mirrored at http://human.st/jesuspuzzle/home.htm.)

Unfortunately for Doherty, there are places in the Pauline letters where Paul does indeed refer to Jesus as having died and been resurrected. Doherty sweeps these under the rug with a bit of, shall we say, apologetics – and Doherty’s excuses for why Paul didn’t really mean that Jesus had literally died seems every bit as twisted as the apologetics applied to the scriptures by some Christians.

I believe this point is brought up in at least one of the earlier threads linked to by tomndebb above.

8

I don’t remember the specifics, but only part of Paul’s letters are usually considered as having been written at the time Paul is supposed to have been living. So, perhaps the OP was refering to the content of the letters usually accepted as being authentic?

Anyway, there are much debate about these supposed letters. Opening a book, I read the following theories :

-Most of the content of Paul’s story (his conversion ) is based on late reinterpretation of jewish misdrahims.

-Some evidences would indicate that the charachter of Paul was “created” at the end of the II° century.

-Paul’s oldest letters would have been “discovered” (made up) around 150 by Marcion, in order to help proving a doctrinal point.

-The infamous Simon would have been the actual author of some of the letters, but they would have been attributed later to the so-called Saül, due to the disagreements between the followers of this Simon (the “simonist”) and the other one (Peter).

-The letters which aren’t deemed authentic would have been written during the IV° century, and the authentic ones rewriten at the same time.

-Only 7 letters would be authentics. The others would have been written during the second century by those amongst the christians who refered to Paul as their main authority (there was several concurent christian doctrinas) once again to make a point.

-Most of the letters are so filled with late additions (caused by doctrinal switches) that is very difficult to figure out what was Paul’s original doctrina. Paul was only a spiritual messianist, and the word “Jesus” in particular has been added during the II° century.

-Marcion only discovered very short “letters”. He rewrote them in order to support his points.Later, they were again “epurated” and rewritten by the anti-marcionists, in particular Irenee and Tertullian.

I stop there, the list of the theories concerning Paul’s letters goes on in this book for several pages…It seems there are much debates amongst the scholars about who wrote what, when and why…

9

The problem is mainly the validity of the statements : “Paul’s letter has been written 20 years after the purported death…” AND “it originally contained references to Jesus”

(references to “Christ” don’t have much meaning , since there has been tons of messianist sects at this time, not always having much in common with christianism as we know it. Anyway, the name “Christ” is coherent with the concept of Paul believing in a spiritual messiah, not in a real man, that the OP seems to support. Finally,even these reference to “Christ” are considered by some to be late additions)

10

cranky, your speculations remind me of the writings of British professor G.A. Wells. If you have not yet read his orks, you may wish to.

**The Jesus of the Early Christians

Did Jesus Exist?

The Historical Evience for Jesus

Who was Jesus?**

Obviously, if someone writes a book entitled “Did Jesus Exist?” you know what his answer is going to be. Wells articulates very well the “argument from silence”, an makes the best case for the position that Jesus Christ was not a historical character. He’s not the only one to push this viewpoint, but I think he’s the best-argued and the most literate.

11

Uh, what “book” are we talking about here?

I have seen each of the theories mentioned before, however, very few of them are considered to be actual scholarly criticisms–and they are rarely accepted outside the circle of the individual authors’ supporters. There is simply not widespread disagreement about the formation of the canon. (There are specific disagreements about specific works, of course.) Your list appears to be a collection of statements gathered from widely disparate sources, an occasional “what if” from a scholar, a line or two dropped in from a theological opponent of one belief or another, an occasional conspiracy theorist.

For example, the theories focussing on Marcinion:

If Marcinion created “Paul” in 150, all the other “theories” introducing “Paul” at the end of the second century or into the fourth are obviously false.

The opponents of Marcinion at the time claim that he forged one letter to the Laodiceans. For them to have labelled one false and create separate lists of “true” letters, it is pretty clear that there would have had to have been a separate collection of letters available, meaning Marcinion could not have been the author of all (or even a significant number) of the other letters.

This one (using ten, not seven) is actually mainstream Biblical scholarship. The camps are not quite equally divided, but a number of scholars identify I Timothy, II Timothy, and Titus as later works. I know of no serious challenge to the Pauline authorship of Romans, I & II Corinthians, Ephesians, Galatians, Philippians, Colossians, I & II Thessalonians, or Philemon.
(Is there some confusion, here, between the thirteen Pauline letters and the seven Catholic leters?)

There are quite a few other copies/versions and translations of most of the New Testament works floating around, including versions in Syriac and Coptic, that agree with each other in great detail. These are referred to well before the end of the second century, so most of the “invented in the second century or later” theories have to ignore a lot of evidence, pretending that only the Greek works are under consideration.

Authors such as Irenaeus, Origen, Clement of Alexandria, Clement of Rome, Epiphanius, and several others can be dated by what they wrote and by the letters they exchanged or the commentaries they made on other works. Each of them comments on some aspect of the holy writings (not yet canonized as Scripture) that places them in particular time frames.

Is it impossible for anyone to have manufactured a myth? No.
However, given the wide distribution of commentary and the internal consistency of Scriptural exigesis that has gone on for the last 1850 years, (Dionysius of Alexandria was testing various works for authorship based on word use and stylistic considerations before 250), compiling a list of “discrepancies” does a better job of providing a list of people with axes to grind than it does in calling into question the generally accepted history of the development of Scripture.
That does not get us back to proof of Jesus in history, of course, but arguments against Jesus being real should have a better provenance than “the charachter of Paul was “created” at the end of the II° century”.

12

Let’s assume Paul was sincere in his writings (criticize them as you may, they appear to be heartfelt and not written for personal profit – he certainly expected to be executed toward the end). That means that Paul was, prior to his conversion, persecuting Christians and having them stoned to death whenever possible, etc. This means that he was probably fairly knowledgable about the beliefs of the early Christians he considered to be heretics, and the facts that they were based on. If Jesus (Joshua ben Joseph) were not a historical figure who was executed with public records to show for it (the Romans were big on records), you would think that he would, after his conversion, offer an explanation for that to reconcile things. Nope. (I’ve got a bias as I am a Christian of the Presbyterian ilk). I’ve seen a number of religions started in modern times for what appears to be profit for their “leader”. Christianity does not really appear to have been started by Paul as so many people have casually suggested. The other apostles appear to have actually existed and were busy spreading the gospel to Jews. Paul convinced them to spread it to everyone, and they did, with far more “success”. This monotheistic religion hit a chord with Greeks and Romans who were used to polytheistic religion that didn’t really address who they were as people and their relation to God. But back to the point about the creation of religions: the apostles who founded Christianity hardly profited. Rather they seemed to have been persecuted for it, and the documentary evidence supporting this is extensive both in the bible and other historical documents, and if Jesus hadn’t lived as we did, I can hardly see the apostles going out and dying for it.

Most of this thread has to do with the fact that the gospels were written after Paul’s epistles. So they were oral traditions before that. So what? That doesn’t mean that they were made up out of whole cloth. The apostles, unlike Paul, were not raised reading and writing. Why would Peter, a fisherman, know how? The gospels were the codification by the friends of the apostles of their accounts. We have no writings from Aristotle (except maybe the constitution of Athens, but I highly doubt that), but rather the extraordinarily elegant notes of his students taken from his lectures. Does that mean that Aristotle did not exist? Nope, he most certainly did. Does that mean his works are falsely attributed to him (kinda like Plato and Socrates)? No. Their logic and organization is very consistent. His students wrote it down and refined it into the beautiful form it is. Same with the gospels. The apostles told their stories over and over and their successors eventually wrote them down, but to do justice to the importance of the matter, corrected organizational and grammatical matters and made the same stories quite elegant. And in the case of Luke, at least, had an audience in mind.

What would cause suspicion is if the fisherman and the tax collector had immediately written perfectly matching stories by their own hands.

Proselyization warning here:
John the Evangelist is attributed to saying in his very old age: “Love one another, that is enough.” This is the most important lesson of Christ’s life.

13

Thanks folks. It’s interesting to see the responses. My questions do indeed come from that online book, which was reviewed on the page I cited in the introduction, the Happy Heretic. After reading that page, I put down some of the ideas there and wanted to see what the dopers thought of them.

14

Uh, what “book” are we talking about here?

Well…I didn’t give the references, sinces it’s a french book, so I suspect few people would have access to it. It’s R.Vaneigem “La resistance au christianism-Les heresies des origines au XVIII° siecle”

It’s a list of various theories from various authors against the authenticity of the Canon. The book is about the history of christian heresies, not about Paul. The authors quoted concerning Paul are Dubourg, Smallwood, Bauer, Loisy, Meaks, Deschner, O’Connor, Erbetta…The only name I’m familiar with is Dubourg, who was a linguist supporting the idea that the source(s) of the gospels are/were originally written in Hebrew (and during the 1st century before christ).

I believe it was quite obvious that in most case, if one of these arguments is right, at least several of the others are wrong. I just wanted to point out that there isn’t a general agreement on the fact that the letters we can read now are those Paul wrote, or that Paul actually wrote all or any of them, or even that Paul actually existed (If I remember correctly, the oldest argument against Paul dates back to the XVIII° century, when some scholar pointed out that Paul said he was a roman citizen from Tarse, while Tarse wasn’t under roman rule at the time Paul is supposed to have been living).

I suppose you will admit that most of the exegets during a large part of the 1850 last years could hardly been qualified as “unbiased”, being themselves firm believers.

Well…the problem is that outside the christian texts and traditions, there are extremely few independant sources about Jesus existence. Out of my head, I believe there are 4 of them :

-2 quotes in Flavius Josephus. One of them is widely considered as being a late addition (since IIRC it seems to be out of context, is strongly supportive of christian beliefs [it refers to the miracles and to the ressurection, using quite a christian terminology], while FJ was a mainstream jewish and never displayed any support toward the various prophets and agitators he cites. The second one is about a Jesus Christ who would have been crucified by Ponce Pilate, but once again the fact that a jewish use the word “christ” (messiah) to qualify him seems a bit too much to a lot of scholars. And finally, there’s a letter wrote long time after by a bishop (of Constantinople? Not sure) complaining that FJ says nothing about Jesus, which seems to indicates that at his time, FJ works didn’t include these two quotes.

-2 quotes by roman authors, wrote IIRC at the begining of the 2nd century (and so quite a long time after the supposed death of Jesus). One of them is part of an account about the reign of Nero, 60 years before, and says that he persecuted christians, who were called that way because they believed in someone called Christ who has been crucified by Pilate. As I said before, it proves only that at the time the author is writing, christians believed that Jesus was a real man and has actually been crucified. The second one only refers to agitators who were led by someone called Christos, or something to this effect. Which proves mainly that the author had no clue about what the christianism was all about.
Given this lack of independant evidences, scholars have to refer to the christian (and other messianist) writings, and try to sort out when they were written, by whom, why, and what was “corrected”, modified, rewriten, supressed, added, etc… They can’t even refer to latter works by contradictors, since these works have dissapeared, and only appear as quotes in christian books written by people refuting them. The fact the scholars can’t agree is no surprise. The fact that a lot of these scholars are actually believers, and hence biased, is a major drawback to make one’s mind.

The strongest evidence that christ did exist is IMO the fact that the christian religion appeared. But nobody can rule out that christian beliefs can be, for instance, a mix of several religious traditions, or jesus a mix of several different historical characters. The more one read about early christianism, the more it appears blurry, unreliable, changing.

And anyway, even if there has been one person actually called jesus, actually crucified around 30, there’s no way we could know who he was. Once again some authors would tend to think he was a prophet, other someone who opposed the roman rule, or an essenian leader, or whatever else…

15

Yes. But your argument makes sense only if you assume first that Paul’s letters were genuine, the account of his life true, etc… and not written or rewritten by someone (or several people) who had a point to make.

Yes. But not all".[/B of them. Also, there are no account about the very beginning of the christian religion. For all I know, this religion could as well be made up by someone who expected to make money (or sesterces). Also, without written references, religious beliefs woudl change quite quickly, with groups splitting, incorporating other beliefs, giving their own interpretation, etc…

I don’t think there are a lot of evidences about the apostoles. Most often, in papers or books I read, they were considered as the “heads” of different christian and concurrent groups, with serious disagreements. Anyway, I don’t think there are any evidence of any of them having meet Jesus. In this case, it would be a proof of his existence. There are nothing clear historically about the apostoles, either.

Yes, Paul (or whoever else wrote the letters) obviously intended to spread the christianism (whatever could have been his version of christianism) to the gentiles and also to have prometed a definite severance of its links with the jewish religion. Once Paul’s letters have been considered as a reference for the new religion, it wasn’t anymore a jewish sect, but an independant belief.

IMO, you’re “buying” too quickly what christianism say about the apostoles, their motives, beliefs, and ultimate fate. More important, there are, even now, quite a few people who have faced death for their belief in some new religion (usually commiting suicide, since we don’t kill the dissidents anymore), despite the fact their leader obviously wasn’t nearly as perfect as the christianism presents Jesus

Indeed, the fact that the religion was based on an oral tradition doesn’t prove that it wasn’t originated by Jesus. But it doesn’t prove it was, either. And historical references to other forms of spiritual christianism without an actual character named Jesus at the same period exist too. So, if for some reason a scholar considers that the people currently said to be the founders of the current christianism didn’t made any reference to an historical christ (because they rule out the reference to jesus in Paul’s letters, for instance), they’ll naturally wonder if the original tradition wasn’t the spiritual one, with a crucified hero added later, after a mixing with other beliefs (essenian, mithraic,sethian, jewish writings,whatever). There are evidences of such mixings (usually in the form of close similarities between the religious beliefs), but of course, there are no proof of it, either.

Indeed, if the gospels were a genuine account about who were the apostoles, etc…it certainly makes sense that they would only appear in written form latter, after an oral transmission (by the way, talking about people who were able to write, there is actually a “gospel according to Pilate”, of course not canonical). But the only point is, once again, it doesn’t prove it happened that way.

16

clairobscur, I will absolutely agree with your statement:

Whatever is believed about Jesus is believed, based on one’s (blind or faith-based) acceptance of the Christian Scriptures.

However, I think this

is simply too strongly worded. It is rather like (not identical to) the folks who say Gould and Dawkins disagree on gradualism and Gould and Wilson disagree about the “selfish gene” and Sagan and Mayr disagreed over probablities of evolved intelligence, so we can’t really be sure that the evolutionary scientists are correct in their deductions.

There are many arguments about the meaning of what has been accepted as the New Testament. There are also violent disputes regarding the age of particular works. However, the basic story of the development of the canon is held to be the same by the overwhelming number of scholars. At this point, Bultmann has had a fairly thorough permeating effect on New Testament scholarship. (The Jesus Seminar attests to that.) Whatever alleged bias is supposed to be out there for the provenance of the canon can no longer have much support. If the issue of belief was really such a powerful obstruction to the truth, then we would not have any consensus that at least three Gospels were written after 70. We would not have a general consensus that Paul did not write I & II Timothy and Titus. There would be no general acceptance that Revelation was written in the 90s instead of the 60s. These ideas are in direct contradiction to the religious tradition, yet the researchers have pursued them, putting aside the aspect of belief to look at the evidence.

When someone claims that Tarsus did not come under Roman rule until Paul was a grown man, that sort of claim is examined. When the evidence shows that Cilicia, including Tarsus, was made a Roman province in 67 BCE, then that line of inquiry is abandoned.

I am not familiar with DuBourg’s work, but the early tradition that Matthew was originally written in Hebrew or Aramaic has been pursued fully, with the current general conclusion being that the version we have was, indeed, originally written in Greek.

Statements taken from Paul’s letters referring to his travels have been matched up to the Acts of the Apostles. External evidence about events in either the letters or the Acts have also been found, maintaining the correspondence of dates. I suppose that someone playing a hoax might have gone to the trouble of making sure that all the letters agree (with historical points to match), but it would be difficult to have taken some off-the-shelf texts from another faith and simply drop in Paul’s name, then hunt up each copy of any circulated letter by Irenaeus, Origen, Clement of Rome, Epiphanius, and anyone else and make sure that all the allusions to Paul were corrected to correspond with each other.

Although Paul may or may not have totally mangled the message of the quasi-historical Jesus, Occam’s razor argues strongly against the success of a massive conspiracy to “invent” Paul (even if you could find two conspiracy theorists who agree with each other).

17

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by tomndebb *
However, I think this

Well…I must disagree. The difference, from my point of view, is that the average scholar writing a book on that matter is usually knowledgeable (like the scientist defending evolution) and biased (like the christian defending creationism).

I don’t know if it’s a same in your country ( I suspect it is), but when searching a book on this topic, you find rows upon rows of works made by some jesuit scholar (or someone with similar christian origin) and…well…more or less nothing written by someone who hasn’t a obvious bias.

I understand these people know what they are talking about. I know there are ready to point out flaws in the tradition (say, for instance :“given the jewish traditions, there is no way such or such event appearing in the gospels could have taken place”, or “this must have been written later than we thought”) but I know also there are steps they will never make (“Paul’s letters are all BS” or “it’s unlikely that Jesus existed”) because these elements are the fundements of their faith.

So, how could I avoid to question their opinions on these topics? Even more, should I even bother to read them, since I know from the beginning that they have made up their minds before even beginning to write the first line? In other words :Yes, there is a kind of consensus. But a consensus which in my view has roughly the same value than a consensus about say, “should we raise taxes on gas?” made by a panel including 95% of representants of the oil industry, who indeed are aknowledgeable about the topic.
It seems that these topics very seldom attract “independant” scholars. I suppose it’s partly due to the still very strong importance religious matters have in our western “christian” countries. Also to the fact that there are a lot of people out there whose life revolve around the gospels and so are writing tons of books arguing about minor points (was this written in 95 or 96?), so “drowing” other opinions on more fundamental points under their mass.

Which leads me to a last point. I believe that non christian scholars aren’t much interested in the debate because, well…there isn’t that much to say. The sources are very limited in number, all very well known, and every possible interpretation has already been given. And any work would probably be like : “there are quite no independant source, everything we know have a religious origin, here the list. These sources have this and that well known flaws. And there is no way we could give a serious answer to this question, since we have no probing element available”. Meanwhile, the authors taking the existence of Jesus (or other important elements) as a given go on printing new books debatting uponthe influence Mark had on Matthew or whatever else.

What bothers me more is the opinions conveyed by the mainstream press, medias, etc…Either because the journalist don’t know about the existing arguments, because the broadcaster don’t want to piss off the viewers or because the author wants to make his book to be sold, I see all an industry providing people with books explaining what the “real” life of jesus was like, etc…

For instance, I remember a documentary (10 times 1 hour or so) about Jesus which was praised by serious newspapers (along the line “so much fresh air on a topic we usually believe to be closed”, even in leftist papers). So, I saw very aknowledgeable people debatting for an hour about, for instance, the trial of Jesus. Indeed, they argued. Indeed they questionned some elements of the gospels. But “fresh air”? None. All the points argued were minors, and for what I knew, nothing new or revolutionnary was ever said, apart if you consider a reference to, say, the “Q” source as “fresh air”. Since we were posting about this, I don’t even think that a controversial but quite neutral topic like the original language of the gospels has been adressed. And it was on an educative/intellectual channel in a pretty “dechristianized” country.

And of course, during these 10 hours of footage, never once the basic question : “did these guy we’re going to talk about existed?” was asked. I consider this as an evidence there is a real issue. I’m pretty sure that if Buddha has been the topic, at least one part, probably the first one, would have been “Buddha, myth or historical character?” or something similar.

18

In fact, in J. Robertson’s book Pagan Christs a chapter was devoted to precisely this question. Robertson came down squarely on the side of Buddha being a myth. Interesting reading.

19

Actually, you should probably go read some works by Rudolf Bultmann or from the Westar Institute and its Jesus Seminar or the related Forum. I assure you that many of these folks do not come with a decidedly “Christian” bias (which raises a lot of ire among some folks).

At any rate, while I have no problem with doubts regarding the existence of Jesus or challenges to whether Paul got “the message” “right” (if there was a Jesus), I find that none of the arguments against the existence of Paul or against the traditional characterization of the way his letters were compiled to carry any weight. The objections are all scattered and contradictory and the interlocked counter-references are too tightly interwoven. It would have required a massive conspiracy across multiple cultures with competing theologies to have pulled it off.