Why you should distrust all religions.

[Jehanne]

Have you, by chance, read the list of things we take to be potentially historic about a historic paul, from Tabor?  

"Authentic paul" contains a paul that claims to see ghosts and then performs miracles to prove his apostleship.  We don;t believe he actually did them...we simply notice that he was the sort of guy who claimed them.  If -that- paul is the one that wrote the authentic paul.....whose word are we taking for the other...seemingly mundane details, again?

You're being hyper-skeptical, lol. There's still someone who authored those Epistles, regardless of what they claim. It wasn't a ghost that wrote them.

The "historic paul" appears to be code for "whoever wrote this shit", and little more.

Aha, and "whoever wrote this shit" calls himself Paul. So Paul it is. Until there is evidence the whole thing is forgery or whatever.

The Gospel of Peter claims, explicitly, to have been written by the Apostle Peter; no scholar believes that to be true.

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Some schizophrenics are mostly coherent, able to hold jobs, etc.  Paul could have had some sort of schziophrenia with some epileptic seizsures that led him to believe that he was having out of body experiences with divine beings.  These things do happen, and given the artificial selection of religion, such would explain their genesis.

And he could also have eaten some moldy bread, been sleep deprived, dehydrated, ......... Or it could have all been made up for attention/manipulation. Who knows. The fact the people seemed to believe him indicates that he was probably not schizophrenic. Look at all of the others things people believed back then, (some even now) that we now know is crap.

Or, maybe he had eaten the wrong mushrooms; the possibilities are nearly endless.