rationalskepticism.org

Pierce Inverarity wrote:While I don't subscribe to Doherty's brand of mythicism Re: the existence of Jesus as a historical person, I think it is highly unlikely that such a person ever existed or was the inspiration/founder for earliest Christianity.

"Highly unlikely", why exactly?

Tim, when you say

It's pretty hard for any objective analysis to read all that as anything other than Paul talking about an earthly, historical person.

you're conflating "earthly" and "historical." Is it not possible that Paul believed Jesus had an (utterly obscure) earthly existence but that nevertheless there was no such actual person?

Given that Paul tells us he had met and known Jesus' friend Peter and his brother James, I can't see how this works.

"Born of a woman" in Paul, for me, actually confirms this view, for what man is not born of a woman? It highlights just how little Paul can say about this person.

If you isolate it from the other things he says about this person and remove it from its context, you can make it look that way, certainly. But he does say other things about a historical Jesus and he is saying several other things about him even in Galatians 4:4 - he also says he was a Jew and that he came to fulfil the Law.

In all, this and other passages in Paul (and out of the whole corpus, your few citations are nearly exhaustive) offer so little in the way of any specificity that would indicate biographical rather than mythical/legendary material, and absolute silence on anything that appears in the Synoptic narrative, that it's become impossible for me to read Paul as talking about the figure that is presented to us in the gospels.

Again, context is everything. I wrote an e-mail to my brother the other day that referred in passing to our late father. But I didn't mention the circumstances of his death, when it occurred or describe his funeral. Why? Context - the e-mail had nothing to do with these things. And Paul does refer to things in the synoptics - his teaching on divorce and the apocalypse, as well as his final meal, his execution, the role of the Jewish leaders in his death, his burial and his resurrection.

In a recent series of exchanges with a real, live PhD NT scholar, it has become even more clear to me that the ones in this debate who "assume their conclusion" are the historicists.

Because the arguments of the Mythicists are so weak and it's not necessary to go back and re-invent the "did Jesus exist?" wheel whenever anyone begins to talk about the historical Jesus. Some things are taken as settled. And I don't think you'll find any historicists here assuming any such thing - we've all put every single idea in this debate under the microscope many times. I know I certainly have.