Frank Merton
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The thing about Paul, and I think you are roughly correct about his dates, is that he knows nothing of the earthly Jesus we see in the Gospels. His Jesus is in Heaven about to return in glory. He has that Jesus died and was resurrected, but no details, and is widely interpreted as thinking of events that took place in a hazy mythical time.
That's not the textual situation. While Paul cannot say of his own natural knowledge that his beliefs about Jesus are correct, he fairly obviously believes that Jesus, wherever he is now, at some recent time walked on Earth.
Among his fellow visionaries, he lists James, identified as a brother of Jesus and as somebody Paul did meet, in the flesh. Paul doesn't simply know that Jesus was betrayed, but recites an abbreviated "institution narrative." That depicts Jesus eating and drinking, which are earthly activities. Also, the institution narrative is presented as something familiar to his reader. Either Paul taught them this, or somebody else did, but etiher way, Paul knows what it is, and that the Jesus whom the narrative depicts is instituting something on Earth.
Jesus' teaching has few things to distinguish it from others', and Paul's teaching mostly applies his own Pharisaic thinking, which Jesus would not necessarily have agreed with. However, Jesus' teaching on divorce is peculiar to him and frankly counter-scriptural. Jesus reportedly forbade remarriage after divorce, except for special circumstances.
1 Corinthians 7: 10-15 appears to try to reconcile a similar teaching Paul says he got from "the Lord" with the realities of a Gentile church (while Jesus' comments would have been solely for Jewish listeners). Thus, Paul appears to know a living Jesus teaching about a purely Earthly concern, divorce and marriage.
Finally, frrom a psychological point of view, Paul, who places so much emphasis on the physical character of the Resurrection, avoids Jerusalem during the entire period when Jesus' body would be entombed before secondary burial. As is routine in ego-defense, Paul has a song and dance about why not doing the obvious (going to Jerusalem to see that prematurely empty tomb for himself, now that he thinks it ought to be empty) was the right thing to do. It also helps to explain his emphasis on belief without evidence, which is a curious aspect of a religion whose distinctive feature is its historical character.
Had Paul tested what he made of his vision, then ... well, it depends on whether the tomb actually was untimely empty. That he took such care defending from refutation those personal conjectures in which he had invested so much, suggests that Paul believed that there was a tomb, recently used at the time of the beginning of his ministry, located in the city he took such care to avoid, where associates of the tomb's occupant still lived.
However,
PA
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Whether Paul knew about it or not, as soon as his writings hit the scene, if Jesus never existed, someone would have written about it.
The writings were letters to Gentile believers located anywhere except Jerusalem. Who would read them, except people who believed that Jesus existed? If someone else did read a letter, why would they care whether Jesus existed? If they cared, how would they know whether he existed or not? If they didn't know and wanted to find out, what do you propose they should do? It's twenty years on. If there was a tomb, then it's empty, or in use by somebody else.
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... there were several writers who disagreed with Christianity, they argued against Jesus on many areas, but none of them argued against his existence.
And how many of those arguments do we have from the debater, and not from the Christian apologist with whom he debated?
Edited by eight bits, 02 February 2013 - 08:08 PM.
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Crikey, on 02 February 2013 - 02:49 PM, said:
RAW Berris... Dare you enter?
