Jesus Never Existed Com

[Mudhammam]

If there wasn't a real Paul, who authored the letters that are generally agreed upon to be his authentic work? I'm fairly certain that others before Marcion were aware of Paul and his epistles. This hypothesis seems to be grasping at straws.

I've spent many an hour looking into things such as did Marcion invent Paul or was it somebody earlier? Who wrote the letters which aren't generally agreed upon to be authentic? Did Marcion forge the originals of the inauthentic ones and were they then altered by Tertullian who denounced the Marcion heresy and declared Paul to be orthodox?

Tertullian. Five Books Against The Marcion Heresy


I think the point of Humphreys' approach is to indicate that skeptics need to evaluate their sources. If they don't they could end up with something like "Jesus was the fabrication of the non-existent Paul who was a pupil of Simon the Magus who mightn't have existed either." This wouldn't be very helpful when discussing Christianity with believers.

It seems like a pointless endeavor though I can support anything that arouses a person's skepticism and causes him/her to do further research.

This is one reason I have a difficult time taking New Testament studies seriously. For every different "expert" you come across, you get a WIDELY varying sequence of events. Unless you're dealing with Evangelicals, in which it's all true because...well let's face it, their mental stability depends on it (or so they subconsciously believe it does).

I don't agree with Robert Price's Jesus myth hypothesis but I support his approach, which is methodological naturalism. He isn't philosophically opposed to the possibility of miracles (though in the biblical sense, I am), he just doesn't see any evidence to suggest any occurred in Christianity's origins. I concur and I'd even say that much should be obvious to any one with half an imagination.

Anyway, it seems like just going off some rudimentary historical method, there's little reason to doubt the existence of a first-century Hellenistic Jew named Paul though, as was true for the first couple centuries, his existence--as with Jesus--is of little significance.