Intelligent Atheists: Who/What Was Jesus?

[Aractus]

Pay attention:

I said that Paul invented the Jesus character to sell his religion of resurrection.  Paul's disciples wrote the Gospels as a backstory to Paul's character.  Paul's focus was on resurrection.  He didn't say very much about the imaginary Jesus character except to say that he came back from the dead and that if the dummies believed that then they would as well.

Paul never says that Jesus came back to earth from the dead. He does not appear to know about the resurrection story of Jesus. As far as he knows Jesus was raised into the heavenly realm.

Paul created Christianity and established its basic rules and rituals.  As time passed and the religion splintered people tossed a lot of those rules and rituals into the trash can.  The only ritual the Jesus character ever gave was the one of communion.

Oh right, so what rules and rituals then did Paul instil?

BTW, the Paul character was one of the greatest liars in the entire Bible.  He said and did whatever it took to convince the dummies of the BS that he was spewing.

And where is your convincing evidence that Paul was a great liar?

James and Jude supposedly knew Jesus but they hardly mention him at all.  James thought that prayers and magic oil could cure sickness.  Jude spent most of his very short message rambling about stuff that happened in the Old Testament.

There is no "supposed" about it; James did know Jesus and he was either James the Just or James the brother of John the Baptist. There are no other known Jameses that could have written the epistle. Judas on the other hand specifically identifies himself as the brother of James (and Jesus). There are only two other Judases mentioned in the gospels: Judas Iscariot the apostle who betrays Jesus, and Jude the other apostle (son of James). I'm not that interested in the authorship of Jude - if it is pseudonymous then all it means is that somebody wrote a short epistle using his name and mostly talked about things in the OT, which itself shows that it was directed towards Jewish Christians and not gentile Christians. When he wrote it is guesswork, but my guess is before 68AD since the church in Jerusalem appears to be completely destroyed by 70AD, which just leaves the gentile churches.

But James on the other hand is much more interesting. He has detailed knowledge of the teachings of Jesus, and yet he is writing before any of the four gospels has been written. He couldn't have got that knowledge from Paul because Paul doesn't use the direct teachings of Jesus from the gospels, aside from the Lord's Supper.