Shit. What The Hell. Jesus Never Existed

[Aractus]

You keep saying "other apostles" as if those guys have any historicity to speak of. While I concede that Paul was probably a real guy (others can fight with you about that), I've yet to see any compelling evidence that the Big 12 actually existed, either.

Well Redbeard, besides Peter I didn't have anything to say about the 12 hand-picked disciples of Jesus now did I?

If we're supposed to be taking their testimony as evidence that they believed in a real guy, they had damn well better have at least as much historicity as Jesus; alas, it turns out most of them actually have less. More than half of them are just names on a page, and even those aren't consistent between accounts.

So what? I was specifically talking about Paul, James (the Just), and Peter. I didn't say anything about the 12 so don't come on here making straw man arguments. Also, it doesn't matter if a person has more evidence for their existence or less when compared to some other ancient person - each is analysed individually.

The very fact that you think Paul was "probably a real guy" as opposed to what any decent scholar would tell you (which is that he was certainly a real person) just goes to show you have a poor grasp of accepted history when it comes to the New Testament period.

Paul is the hinge on which early Christian writings swing because he's virtually the only canonical NT scribe whose authorship we're even partially sure of. The books that are supposed to have been written by Peter, James, and Jude were most likely written by people who spoke Greek as a first language and not Palestinian Jews.

That's just not true. In fact once again you've proven your inability to think critically or even cite the current scholarly understanding. Luke-Acts is another work that scholars are near unanimously agreed upon - i.e. we can have confidence that Luke-Acts is the work of a single author; and they also agree the author was a contemporary for the events from Acts 13 on. In fact, they don't even dispute who the author is, since Luke-Acts are anonymous works it's not required to know if the author was Luke or someone else - and any decent scholar will tell you that the author was most likely to have either been Luke or someone else who we know little about, whoever it was it was someone converted to Christianity in the mid-late 40's AD.

The very fact that you would lump the epistles of Peter with James and Jude just goes to show you have zero idea of what you're talking about. James's epistle is drastically different to "Peter's" two. The two claiming to be Peter's were almost certainly written in the second century. James's however was not - it was written probably in or before AD 49. There is no compelling evidence that the work is pseudononymous, and in fact if it was you need to explain why the author would use James's name instead of someone more prominent in the early Church? And specifically, James only has sway over anything up until the Council of Jerusalem - after that he appears to have no direct influence over the doctrines, theology, or leadership of the early church. So by the time this epistle would have been written, if it really was pseudononymous, James was simply not an authority figure to which people were interested in listening to. Jesus's other brother Judas probably wrote the Epistle of Jude, but it's really hard to say given how short the Epistle is and I don't think we're going to get anywhere in trying to answer that question, other than to acknowledge that it's unlikely to have been a forged work given how brief the epistle is and how little it actually has to do with doctrine. Most scholars do believe that Judas (the brother of Jesus) was probably the author.

Furthermore the Epistle of James is the most Jewish book in the New Testament, the fact that you would claim it is the work of a Greek and not a Jew is just plain disingenuous. The Greek is indeed excellent - perhaps matched only by the Greek in the book of Hebrews, but that's no evidence against authorship since we have no other epistles from James.