(May 16, 2011 at 8:23 pm)Minimalist Wrote: Of course, if there was no Gamaliel then who was "Paul's" teacher? At what point does the whole house of cards start to come down?You're right - Gamaliel's non-existence is another nail in the coffin for the Pauline existence theory. No doubt there are all other kinds of figures who we can also rule out using the same kinds of arguments: James (the Jamesian reference in Josephus being a Christian forgery), Peter (the letters ascribed to him are often argued to be pseudipigrapha, and there are no non-Biblical non-Christian references to Peter), every "disciple" actually.
We can start to piece lots of things together now:
The Gospels and Acts are works of fiction written no earlier than the 80s CE (probably much later).
The Pauline epistles, Petrine epistles, letters of James, Jude and John are pseudipigrapha, presumably written around the same time if not even later.
There are wholesale forged passages in both Josephus and Tacitus.
Jesus, Paul, Peter, James, John, Gamaliel, ... - none of these folks actually existed.
Clearly, a group of "Christians" at some point sat down, came up with their Jesus story, being careful to use a few known characters like Herod and Pontius Pilate to make it sound believable. They realised that to make it really believable, Jesus' "disciples" would have had to have some history as well - hence Acts and the letters ascribed to the different followers. They added credibility by introducing a few differences and historical inaccuracies in the four accounts, to make them seem like real historical documents. They named the Gospels after famous followers to make them sound credible too. Final step was to take all the known copies of Josephus and Tacitus, and rewrite them with references to their newly-created characters. And then, mission complete. They then just had to sell their story to some gullible Jews and Gentiles to get the thing started off.
