I came across a very recent debate between Bart Ehrman and Michael Bird on Ehrman's book "How Jesus became God".

It's on youtube and two hours long having been recorded on separate days of one hour debates.

I haven't watched it yet myself but it might be of interest to some following this thread and general subject. Incidentally Ehrman is expected to debate Robert Price on the historicity of Jesus later this year.

I was surprised to learn that Bart's asking price to do this planned debate with Bob Price is thirteen thousand dollars. He's donating it to charity but that sum has to be raised first before he debates.

Anyway here's the link to Ehrman vs Bird. www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtkeNuCwinc

Robert Tulip wrote: Good catch. I meant in terms of the information we now have, in which the earliest commentary about Jesus is from Paul. However, I believe Paul must have been writing for a fairly extensive secret mystery Gnostic community who formed the idea with and before him of the incarnation of the prophesied messiah. Paul's epistles reflect the public face of that community, in a form that would prove acceptable to the church in combination with the Gospels and other NT canon. The original community also must have had a much more extensive religious vision, based on Jewish myth and other sources, which was partly lost and partly formed the basis for the Gospels, the apocalypse and the apocrypha.

I need to ask if you mean "incarnation," since what you've been saying is exactly the opposite, that Paul or Paul and his cohorts were referencing a celestial deity at all times, with the many mentions of an earthly Jesus only seeming to be that, actually still placing Jesus in the celestial realm.

If we look at the seven letters that are considered as Paul's own work, rather than those perhaps written in his name (less gentle word: forged), we don't see much opportunity for this writing you speak of as directed toward a Gnostic community. Apart from what you call the public face of the letters, there is very little left, quantitatively. They are directed at the practical matters of church-building; even when he does expound theology it is usually for the purpose of resolving the issue that consumed him: why gentiles should be admitted without having to follow Jewish law. I think it is a mistake to even call the letters public, since if you were insisting that Paul's silence on the life of Jesus is telling partly because in an epistle one expects to see personal details about the subject broached, you would also expect them to be addressed to a particular closed audience, as letters are, which is in fact the case with his letters. He is writing only to those fledgling churches, not to another audience or the world at large. Gnostics surely did later seize on aspects of Paul, something that at first came as a surprise to Elaine Pagels. But they were riffing on parts of Paul rather than characterizing his ministry. i also think that that would not have greatly pleased Paul, because Gnostic-like attitudes about advanced knowledge had a bad effect, in Paul's eyes, on the cohesion of the church.

Jesus Christ clearly was not invented by Paul alone, since Paul expresses continuity with a spiritual tradition going back to the prophets. The title Christ Jesus literally means 'Anointed Saviour', so any discussion of an incarnate anointed saviour is by definition discussion of Jesus Christ. As well, we have the range of other influences on the evolving tradition, especially the logos theology of Philo of Alexandria, which contains a proto-Christianity shortly before Paul, but again with no knowledge of life and deeds of Jesus.

My point about the spiritual tradition going back to the prophets is that the issue of it would naturally be a human messiah, rather than an invention of a new god--very un-Jewish. Here we have the continuity between scripture and the the evolution of Jesus Christ, with the incipient Christian groups proposing that the man Jesus was either divine or was in the end made divine. This was a violent jolt to Jewish thought and accounts for the hostility of Jews toward Jewish Christians.

We are dealing with a problem ex pede Herculem, from the foot - Hercules. From Pythagoras, this is about how we postulate a whole reality based on fragmentary evidence. Paul is only a fragment of what must have been a very rich intellectual tradition of which almost nothing beside remains. "Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away."

I don't see the situation as quite so Ozymandias-like, but there is hardly any doubt that if we had even a fraction of the total written documents that must have existed at the time, documents relating not just to religion but to all areas of daily life, we could say with more certainty how things were.

Robert Tulip wrote:Jesus Christ clearly was not invented by Paul alone, since Paul expresses continuity with a spiritual tradition going back to the prophets. The title Christ Jesus literally means 'Anointed Saviour', so any discussion of an incarnate anointed saviour is by definition discussion of Jesus Christ.

It's a standard claim by mythicists that Jesus was "invented" by Paul, and Robert says others also.There are many problems with this view. It invariably is based on strained and frankly bad interpretation of Paul's letters.

Here's a critical review of a chapter of a book making these Jesus "invented" by Paul claims. The review is helpful in highlighting the problems with mythicist interpretations of Paul's letters.The mythicists need to follow their interpretations of Paul to their logical conclusions.

The standard riposte that the supernatural and resurrection are more improbable than mythicist theories, on philosophical naturalism,doesn't justify the assertion that Paul is saying something different to what he obviously is saying.Or that he believed in some sort of non historical celestial being.

http://diglotting.com/2012/10/06/review ... r-part-ii/

For my part, I wish that mythicists would become more mainstream so that the price of their books would come down. Carrier's is $31.50; this one is $72! I agree that reading "James the brother of the Lord" to mean "one of the select group" is tortured. In the context there seems no reason to think anything other than biological brother.

DWill wrote:For my part, I wish that mythicists would become more mainstream so that the price of their books would come down. Carrier's is $31.50; this one is $72! I agree that reading "James the brother of the Lord" to mean "one of the select group" is tortured. In the context there seems no reason to think anything other than biological brother.

Some of these book prices must be mythical rather than historical, Dwill!

ask and You shall receive

DWill wrote: but if it is preached that Christ rose from the dead...
2 Corinthians
1--the sufferings of Christ abound for us
4--always carrying the death of Jesus in our bodies so that the life of Jesus may also be made manifest in our bodies
even if we did know Christ in the flesh, we now no longer know him thus
8--for you know the graciousness of our Lord Jesus Christ, and how, when he was rich, he made himself poor so that by his poverty you might become rich
Philippians
2--but he stripped himself by taking the form of a slave, being born in the likeness of a human being, he humiliated himself and was obedient to the death, death on the cross. Therefore did god exalt him.

The texts here allegedly show that Paul considered Jesus Christ to be a human being. They do nothing of the sort. The hymn from Philippians, where Paul says Jesus was “born in the likeness of a human being” does not suggest Paul thought Jesus was born as a human being. “Like” is not “same”. “Similar” does not mean “identical”. A monkey or an imagined God can be like a human, but is not the same as a human. Paul says Jesus was originally in the form of God, but emptied himself to suffer death on the cross and was thereby exalted to become Lord of all the universe. This myth means that divinity is found in the greatest suffering in order to illustrate that all creation participates in the divine. What we have here is an imagined God descending to earth, not by any stretch a story that starts from a human being who is then made divine. For Paul, the divine enters the human in Christ, even while Christ is only “like” a human being.
For Paul, the key memetic mutation of myth was that the one God of the universe was present on our planet in Jesus Christ. How exactly Paul believed this myth of incarnation had occurred is not entirely clear. But what is clear is that the story of Paul’s Jesus is not as simply a physical man, but rather is primarily as spiritual, with the death and resurrection of Christ symbolizing the manifest presence of God on earth.
In Paul’s mind, Jesus the Saviour blends and replaces ideas from older mythological traditions into a single unified story of human redemption from evil. Through this process, Christianity served as a way of mixing, a modus vivendi, able to combobulate the clashing faiths of the common era in the Roman Empire. None of that serves to place Jesus in specific historic context for Paul, who explained the incarnation as cosmic myth, not as the story of a person crucified under Pilate.

DWill wrote: The whole "James brother of Jesus" thing isn't even necessary to establish that Paul thinks Jesus lived and died.

Carrier provides a good analysis of James, pointing out that Paul’s discussion is seriously inconsistent with other mentions of James. The extrapolation from Paul’s epistles via reading of Acts and the Gospels as signifying that James is the physical sibling of Jesus Christ served the conventional church agenda of historicism, but is not supported by any data.

DWill wrote:

Among Paul’s hundreds of mentions of Jesus, “not one connects Jesus with an earthly life… Paul’s Jesus is only ever in the heavens” (515). No historical details, no memories from those who knew him, even incidentally.

No, clearly there is earthly existence here, woven in throughout the letters.

Here again we see use of the term “clearly” as a device of rhetorical emphasis in argument, even though the data fails to support it. If the earthy existence of Christ was ‘clearly’ woven into the Epistles, there would inevitably be some indicator of the place and time of this purported existence. In Paul there is no such clear indicator whatsoever. The clarity here is purely imaginary, derived only from the resolute ignoring of evidence by the pious.

DWill wrote: The manner in which Paul talks about Jesus as having lived cannot mean that he believed he did not live.

But the form of this life of Christ for Paul is ‘in the appearance of mortal flesh’, as a descending cosmic deity, never as a personal historical individual founder of a social movement. As Carrier amply proves, the absence from Paul of even any small historical detail transmitted from Jesus by oral tradition supports mythicism, not historicism. For Paul, Jesus lived in symbolic terms, and part of the symbol was its material efficacy for salvation. This myth of material efficacy provided the trope that grew into the fables of the Gospels.

DWill wrote: There are interesting speculations that can come from the lack of interest that you mention. See, for example, Barrie. A. Wilson's article, "If We Only Had Paul." Paul's obsession with the death and resurrection of Jesus, to the exclusion of most other details about him, tells us that Paul probably was setting up his own religion, separate from the Jerusalem faction. This may or may not be correct, but it's a more responsible use of the information we find lacking in Paul's letters.

No, your idea that Paul would systematically exclude all material derived from the life and teaching of Jesus is not a responsible conclusion or premise. You appear to be positing that a Jerusalem faction around the blood relatives of Christ and his twelve disciples provided a rival original oral tradition which was only later blended with the cosmic myth of Paul. But that is entirely post hoc imagination on your part, with no indicators of this alleged conflict to justify your speculative assumption of Paul’s complete denial and exclusion of a real Jesus.

DWill wrote:

Paul tells the Galatians he received his gospel only by revelation, and “in Romans 15:3-4 Paul even appears to say we have to learn things about Jesus by discovering them in scripture; Paul apparently knew nothing about any community of witnesses [and] even appears to deny any such sources existed in 1 Cor 4.6” (516). “The simplest hypothesis for why Paul never showed any interest in the historical Jesus [is] because there was no historical Jesus” (517).

I quoted the Galatians passage above. It does not make sense to say that Paul is saying Jesus revealed these facts (betrayal, last supper, etc.) to Paul, yet he means that they never happened on earth. Paul mentions "the twelve" in the 1 Corinthians passage.

If they happened on earth, then these alleged events would have been revealed to Paul by witness testimony, not by alleged spiritual revelation from The Lord or from Old Testament prophecy. The betrayal and Lord’s Supper are in 1 Cor 11, and the twelve are in 1 Cor 15. With the resurrection account, Paul does not say Jesus revealed these facts to him but that “scripture” did. That is completely different, as I have already noted. This isolated central claim of alleged Jesus historicism in Paul with his mention of the resurrection in 1 Cor 15 is explicitly stated there by Paul as sourced from scripture, ie from Old Testament prophecy and Psalms. The first eucharist stories of Jesus are not relayed to Paul from anyone who attended this famous first Maundy Thursday repast. Carrier analyses how this symbolic ritual meal serves as a cultic bond for a mystery community, a meaning that places its hypothetical actual occurrence into its real context as imaginary rather than historical. Again, for Paul the myth of the incarnation and Eucharist is an ‘as if’, revealed in imaginary revelation rather than by transmission from those who were there with Jesus. It is a Docetic ‘seeming’ story not a historical account.

The later harmonization of Paul’s mythical Jesus with the incarnation stories of the Gospels is better explained by seeing that these stories elaborated from Paul’s cultic myth with an imagined passion story in Jerusalem. On close analysis, it is not plausible that Paul knew about these place and time locators of Jesus in Jerusalem under Pilate but chose to completely ignore them out of factional spite.

With Paul’s claim that his information on the resurrection was according to scripture, I would like to return again to the meaning of ‘kata’, ‘according to’. We can bake a cake according to a recipe (in accordance with), and we know that fraud is a crime according to the law. These two meanings of ‘according to’ are different. When Paul says Jesus rose according to the scriptures, his real meaning is ambiguous. Literalism jumps on the cake bake meaning that Jesus followed the recipe from the prophets as a messianic blueprint, rising in accordance with prophecy as a cake rises in accordance with a recipe. But if Paul actually meant that his only source for his assertion that Jesus rose is the Old Testament, the meaning is very different, more like us saying the only way we know fraud is a crime is because legal statutes say so. The only allegedly independent data to justify the cake bake meaning of ‘according to’ as ‘in accordance with’ is the Gospels, which of course are not independent at all, and in any case wildly conflict with Paul’s claims about who the risen Christ appeared to.

DWill wrote: Jesus' death and resurrection, it's pretty clear, were what Paul fastened on to. No, you can't tell that the rest--whatever Paul knew of any "rest"--meant anything to Paul. But the facts are still staring us in the face that he had an idea, indeed needed an idea, of Jesus as having lived. In fact, the case can easily be made that everything that is most important about the Jesus of the Gospels is contained in Paul.

Paul’s mythological idea of Jesus is not a literal belief. You are reduced to accepting that all the wandering preacher images of Jesus from the Gospels are completely absent from Paul’s writings, and that Paul is solely fixated on the pure idea of Jesus as God on earth, with none of the Gospel locators in space and time. That is a major concession to mythicism, illustrating how the Christ meme evolved from pure idea, general philosophical principle, rather than as a response to historical events in the world. The key point here is that the presence of God in Christ on earth is the central myth in Paul, as the decisive memetic mutation from previous myths which lacked this comforting trope of redeeming existence.

A good ghost story is always improved by claiming that it really happened as described. That is the psychological driver for all the claims that Jesus really lived. The story of Jesus, the biggest fish story of all, is really about the imagined avatar of the Age of Pisces.

DWill wrote:
In Paul's mind it wasn't Jesus, anyway, who founded the church. There isn't evidence that he thought in those terms. It was Paul himself who thought he was founding the church.

But your citation of the Lord’s Supper from 1 Cor 11 is used in precisely that way, as claiming that Paul said Jesus founded the church as ritual sacramental institution. You can’t have it both ways, saying that Paul refers to a historical Jesus but does not think Jesus founded the church, given that founding the church as cultic organization is the purpose of the Eucharist.

DWill wrote: Is it so weird that someone who was thought of as fulfilling prophecy by dying a sacrificial death would not be discussed in terms of his biography? I don't find it so. It isn't what mattered to Paul. And Paul is obviously setting himself up as "the guy," as far as his children of faith are concerned.

Yes it is weird that someone historical could be imagined as fulfilling prophecy only in death and resurrection, and not in life. That separation of the risen Christ from the alleged living Jesus makes no sense. It ignores the need to ask what about Jesus in life made him so special that his death and resurrection could show the power of God. For Paul it is nothing except a ritual meal, which bears all the signs of imaginary myth rather than real event. The Gospels filled this void from Paul’s pure idea of the risen Christ by imagining the whole life story of Jesus.

DWill wrote:

Understanding this upending of conventional opinion requires “scholars to rethink the sequence of events” (521). The fact is, all traditions of sayings and narratives about Jesus only appear in the record later than Paul, a fact concealed by the church by its strategic placement of the Epistles after the Gospels in the New Testament. As Carrier notes, “the Gospels were in fact fabricated out of the sayings of Paul” (521).

Impossible--Paul contains no sayings of Jesus that could have been used to fabricate the Gospels. Perhaps he means statements Paul made about Jesus such as betrayal, last supper, crucifixion, rising.

You appear to have misread the quote from Carrier; it is about the sayings of Paul not the alleged sayings of Jesus. The outline story of Jesus as risen incarnate Saviour is what Carrier means by ‘the sayings of Paul’ which formed the skeleton that the Gospels enfleshed with miracles, family, locations, sayings, etc, etc.

DWill wrote:So if the writer of Mark got his outline from Paul, where did Paul get what he said about Jesus? Claiming the whole shebang was revealed to him runs into serious problems.

The ability of Christianity to evolve into the dominant religion of our planet must rest upon social structures that actually existed and which evolved incrementally from precedent structures. The nature of evolution as working by cumulative adaptation in response to selective pressures applies equally to cultural memetics as to biological genetics. What works expands and what doesn’t work contracts. Paul’s ideas did not come out of thin air, but expressed and responded to social needs at the time. An example of ancient religious evolution is the evolution of the Christian bishop’s hat from Mithraic practice. The social structure of the Christian church, as the carrier of Paul’s ideas, evolved from precedent structures.
The great ferment of mystery religion in the ancient world provided the context in which Paul’s ideas seeded fertile soil. While Paul himself says his ideas about Jesus came from revelation in scripture, the transmission and understanding of the messianic prophecy from the Jewish prophets required an institutional framework to convey the revelation. That framework emerged from the syncretism of traditional Judaism with Greek, Egyptian, Babylonian, Indian and other mythologies, as a way to provide a new coherent religious vision that would explain the relation between God and the world under the new desolate dispensation of Rome.

DWill wrote:

Carrier summarizes his critique of Pauline Christ Historicism in these words: “it is simply not conceivable that the historical Jesus never said or did anything, nor was anything ever said or done to him, that was relevant to resolving any dispute or supporting any teaching raised in these letters” (523). No curiosity, no incidental details, nothing. In a letter all about someone you would naturally expect it to have something about them in it.

Puzzlement, or an argument from incredulity, isn't enough. Paul clearly nevertheless believed that the person had lived. His theology is meaningless without that element, so no wonder.

Paul’s belief in Jesus can better be understood on the model of Kant’s refutation of Anselm’s alleged ontological proof of the existence of God. Anselm’s claim that a supreme being must necessarily exist because existence is better than invention begs the question, assuming its conclusion. For Paul, Jesus is a necessary being, just as God is a necessary being for Anselm.

Kant’s logical observation that just because we can imagine something does not mean it must exist applies with greater force to Jesus than to God. We can well imagine a mediator between time and eternity, reconciling all things to himself by the blood of the cross, the pre-existent word of grace, as the Paulines describe in the great cosmic hymn of the first chapter of the letter to the Colossians. Paul’s imagination of the descent of Christ from heaven to earth provides the foundation upon which the great imagination of the Historical Jesus was grounded, and the meaningful structure of his theology, but its real meaning is found as a work of imagination, not observation. My interest is not to say Paul’s theology is meaningless, but to show that the real meaning is in what Kant termed the transcendental imagination of necessary truth, not in a literal historical description of events.

DWill wrote:

So the faithful come up with another excuse. They say Paul did not want to draw attention to the fact that he did not know Jesus in person. To which Carrier makes the withering refutation that “if it was a weakness he would constantly have to address it head on. Because it would constantly be thrown in his face … yet there is no sign in his letters that it was. This is therefore just another made-up excuse, for which we have no evidence, and ample evidence to the contrary… Only if there were no witnesses would revelation be the defining feature of apostolic authority.” (525-6) That role of revelation is exactly what we see in Galatians. Paul’s supposed anxiety about not being a witness is “a modern fiction”.

Because there is quite enough in the letters to show us that Paul saw Jesus as first having lived, this excuse you say the faithful make is irrelevant.

Your “quite enough” is nothing, except as imagination. You are failing to engage with Carrier’s positing of what would plausibly have occurred if Jesus were real. Those who knew first-hand about Jesus would refer to his authority, but in the Bible they never do. Paul dwells on how Christ died and was raised by God. As to ‘Christ first having lived’, Paul provides nothing except for vague general allegories about the seed of David and being born of a woman. These all remain within the ‘as if’ likeness of Docetism, the hypothetical imagination that asks if God appeared on earth what would he be like.

For the integrating synthesis of early Christianity, this ‘as if’ messiah brought together the totality of myth into the prophetic vision of Judaism, producing a compelling resonant story to comfort the world in the bleak environment of the fall from grace.

The ‘excuse the faithful make’ for the complete absence of the life and work of Jesus from the letters of Paul does deserve analysis, and is actually relevant to what Paul really meant. Rather than the contortions of logic involved in your claim that Paul failed to say anything about Jesus that could be specifically located because Paul was engaged in factional squabbles with those who knew Jesus, the evolution of the Christian movement is far better explained as from myth to story, from cosmology to theology and historicism. The historicism of the Gospels and the later church was essential to the politics of theology. The simple story about Jesus of Nazareth enabled the placeless Christ of the Pauline faith to relate to ordinary people, giving traction to the emerging mass movement, and enabling the later subordination of the Christian altar to the Roman throne.

DWill wrote:

What all this material amply demonstrates is the obvious fact that our records of the first century have been heavily selected by two thousand years of Christian censorship, burning everything that conflicted with their dogma. And yet, the dogma itself is a naked emperor, with Paul’s Epistles, only referring to an imagined Jesus, never a real one. Analysed forensically, the fugitive traces of the real history are present as the only plausible basis of the actual text we have.

How do you figure? Who burned the evidence from the first century, some orthodox power of the period?

It is a sad thing in discussions of religion that even when false claims are repeatedly refuted they continue to return like the zombies from the graves of Jerusalem described by Matthew after the resurrection of Christ. The destruction of original records about early Christianity is amply proved, and need not have occurred prior to the orthodox ascendancy for those records to fail to have survived. Roman Emperors in the era of early Christendom made possession of heretical literature a capital crime. Anyone possessing books deemed to conflict with orthodox dogma was subject to execution by the state. This law provided strong incentive for people to remove such books from their libraries. Gnostic literature survived only in the jaundiced extracts selected for mockery by its tormentors, and then in the much later selection in the desert sands of the southern extremity of Egypt.

The so-called Gnostic Gospels were saved from the advancing Roman legion by careful monks of Nag Hammadi who buried their sacred books in a single cache for posterity. With that scanty record, we can hardly imagine that our extant sources are representative of the rich debates that must have informed the construction of the Christ myth. The prevailing culture of oral secrecy among mystery cults like Christianity made real origins highly vulnerable to suppression. The extant material is winnowed through an orthodox sieve, which selected only the writings it preferred, retaining almost nothing from the first century except the canonical texts.

Instead of accepting the word validated by the selective pressure of history as written by the victors, as Jesus Fundamentalism does, good scholarship requires the deconstruction of received accounts. The Pythagorean method, ‘from the foot, Hercules’, is required for forensic analysis of the fugitive traces of the original mythic construction of Christ that survive within orthodox texts. These traces are abundant, thanks to the ability of their authors to carefully hide them with metaphor to preserve them from the tender gaze of the inquisitors.

Deconstruction of the Bible to produce a plausible explanation of its evolution reveals that Christian theology was grounded in the ancient observation of the sky, in empirical naked-eye cosmology. The Biblical concept of the ages is based on the astronomical clock observed by the ancients in the precession of the equinoxes. Unfortunately, theology and astronomy are mostly not on speaking terms, so this explanation falls on deaf ears.

DWill wrote: [Destruction of heretical material] would go against what any historian of the religion of the time would tell you about the environment.

Really DWill, you should not just make stuff up. You are implying that the destruction of heretical material did not skew our data regarding the actual thought of the early Christians. That is absurd, and the Bible implies as much, where the Epistles of John warn that mythicists are the Antichrist. Carrier is a historian of the religion of the time, and his observation of the scantiness of records from the first century well explains the selective process which means our current sample is not an accurate indicator.

DWill wrote:Or is it the true orthodox church of several centuries later that burned what it had of heretical first-century stuff, eliminating the smoking gun?

Yes, that is completely sufficient to explain the absence of data.

DWill wrote:The gun was found at Nag Hammadi, but not exactly smoking in regard to a historical Jesus having never been thought of until the Gospels were written.

The Nag Hammadi texts cannot be considered definitive for events that happened three hundred years before they were hidden in the sands. It is more likely that the original Gnostic authors of most of the canonical New Testament imagined that they could operate the two level method well described by Elaine Pagels, with the public text serving as an entry point for novices and the real meaning explained to initiates, as Jesus himself explains in the Gospels.

The Valentinian Gnostic school of the second century is not some smoking gun providing conclusive evidence for a concealed tradition, any more than a conversation today could be relied on to explain social movements of a century ago. To understand the Bible construction process, we are better advised to stick to the Bible itself, exploring how its own arguments relate to possible antecedent conditions. Carrier applies this Bayesian Logic, and conclusively proves that Paul’s epistles make sense on the basis of mythicism and are incoherent on the basis of historicism.

The most plausible explanation for the texts we have is that the Gnostic founders tried to found the church as a Platonic Republic separating the inner and outer church, but the outer church overwhelmed and destroyed the original inner church. Political schemers allied to the state in order to suppress information that undermined their agenda of building a mass movement based on the literal story of the historical intervention of God on earth in Jesus Christ.

DWill wrote: Christ myth theory accepts assumptions of the higher Bible criticism, but then it goes further, beyond the warrant of the evidence. It is true that Jesus Christ is myth; it is also true that there is a progression from initial bare detail about Jesus to fleshing out the biography of this figure, a biography that has little that can be confirmed in history. This process ends in almost a fetishizing of the person of Jesus, for reasons that suited the orthodox church. But in the crucial testimony of Paul, as the earliest Christian theologian, Jesus is not originally God, but man.

For Paul, Jesus is originally the pre-existent logos, known to Moses as the coming messiah. The central alleged historicism text in Paul, 1 Cor 15, actually says in v47 that unlike Adam who comes from earth, Jesus comes from heaven. Paul’s prophetic vision of the coming of Christ at the last trumpet is never presented as a return. Rather, when Paul says that now we see through a glass darkly but then face to face, he means that the work of Christ in repairing the sin of Adam through his death on the cross is conceived as a cosmic symbol for the big structure of history, fall and redemption.

Paul imagines Jesus Christ as the presence of divine grace in the world, but this presence is purely spiritual and a hope for the future, not a description based on actual events in history.

Just to summarize key failures in Carrier's thesis.

1 There is no evidence that Paul syncretised pagan mystery religions. On the contrary he was very much opposed to pagan concepts of God and this is found in his letters.

2. Carriers "copycat" examples such as Osiris, and Zalmoxis fail when examined.

3.Acts is not the genre of "Historical fiction".

4.Constant appeals, rejected by historians and biblical scholars to "interpolations" in such as Tacitus,Josephus,and Paul,where he speaks of Jesus being killed by the "Judeans" for instance.

5.The failure to produce a single example from O.T. scripture of a promised non human,celestial messiah "crucified by demons in the sub-lunar realm" which Paul could have derived such a messiah from. In fact there are many examples of a human earthly messiah expected in the O.T. and Jewish messianic expectation reflected this.

Messianic prophecy describes much better the concept of God becoming incarnate in human history,born in Bethlehem, and rejected by men and the earthly rulers etc.

6. Strained interpretation to explain away Paul's reference to "James the brother of the Lord" in Galatians and more strained reading of Josephus on the execution by Ananias the high priest of "James the brother of Jesus called Christ" in Josephus.

Robert's astrotheological interpretations lead to nonsense reading of Paul. If Christ is the allegorical 'sun' and the apostles the 'twelve signs of the zodiac' then Paul could not have interacted with real people like Peter, James and John, as he said he did.

If Paul says for instance that Christ appeared first to Peter,then "the twelve", then James etc, what does this mean?

That Christ appeared to an individual 'sign of the zodiac' Peter,then the twelve signs of the zodiac and finally to Paul who is not a sign of the zodiac!?

There are many examples like this where astro-theology is just a nonsense reading of Paul.