Paul's Beliefs

[Oldandeasilyconfused]

I propose that Paul never referred to an Earthly Christ but a Spiritual one. This is made clear in verse 4 which implies the mystery of Christ wasn't made known by Jesus himself (really?) but instead, all mysteries of Christ Jesus were made known to everyday apostles through spiritual revelation.

An interesting,if not very original idea,and I think plausible,but not conclusive.


References;

"Paul; The Mind Of An Apostle" A N Wilson"

"The Jesus Puzzle" Earl Doherty. I have not read this book, only the Wiki article,but the premise is interesting.He may well be right, or not.
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Earl J. Doherty (born 1941)[1] is a Canadian author of The Jesus Puzzle (1999), Challenging the Verdict (2001), and Jesus: Neither God Nor Man (2009). Doherty argues for a version of the Christ myth theory, the view that Jesus did not exist as an historical figure.

The Jesus Puzzle

Doherty has used the title "The Jesus Puzzle" for four different works. In 1997, the Journal of Higher Criticism published his article, "The Jesus Puzzle: Pieces in a Puzzle of Christian Origins."[6] His non-fiction book The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ? was published two years later. He uses the title for a website where he publishes additional commentary and responses to reviews and criticisms of his work.[7] He also used the title for a novel which he provides for download on his website.[8]

In all four of these works, Doherty presents views on the origins of Christianity, specifically promoting the view that Jesus is a mythical figure rather than a historical person. Doherty argues that Paul and other writers of the earliest existing proto-Christian Gnostic documents did not believe in Jesus as a person who incarnated on Earth in an historical setting. Rather, they believed in Jesus as a heavenly being who suffered his sacrificial death in the lower spheres of heaven in the hands of the demon spirits, and was subsequently resurrected by God. This Christ myth was not based on a tradition reaching back to a historical Jesus, but on the Old Testament exegesis in the context of Jewish-Hellenistic religious syncretism heavily influenced by Middle Platonism, and what the authors believed to be mystical visions of a risen Jesus.

According to Doherty, the Jesus myth was given a historical setting only by the second generation of Christians, somewhere between the 1st and 2nd century. Doherty claims that even the author of the Gospel of Mark probably did not consider his gospel to be a literal work of history, but an allegorical midrashic composition based on the Old Testament prophecies. In the widely supported two-source hypothesis, the story of Mark was later fused with a separate tradition of anonymous sayings embodied in the Q document into the other gospels; according to Doherty these became interpreted as the literal history of the life of Jesus. Doherty denies any historical value of the Acts of the Apostles, and refers to works by John Knox, Joseph B. Tyson, J.C. O'Neill, Burton L. Mack and Richard Pervo in dating Acts into the 2nd century and regarding it as largely based on legend.[9] In 2009 Doherty self-published a revised edition of his book, with a new title of Jesus: Neither God nor Man.[10]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jesus_Puzzle