Regarding Jesus

[Confused Ape]

Ref. Post #42: Paul based his religion on the Pharisee idea of resurrection and he preached that Jesus had indeed risen from the dead. That's the whole basis for Christianity. Paul's disciples then wrote the back story about how Jesus came to be crucified.

Paul's stories came first then the Gospels.

This is assuming that Paul really existed, of course. Jesus Never Existed Com has a section devoted to showing that the Paul portrayed in the Bible is very unlikely. St Paul The Apostle -– Could it all be a fabrication?

There might have been somebody but we'll never know what he really said. Marcion, who promoted Paul as the greatest apostle, could have forged some epistles or altered them to suit his agenda. Later on, Tertullian wrote his books against the Marcion heresy where he accused Marcion of altering texts. Everything suggests that Tertullian and his faction rewrote stuff to suit their own agenda under the pretext that they were restoring everything to the original versions.

There was a time that I shared Hitch's opinion on that until, as Min pointed out, I realized that it was "just because".

It's impossible to find out what, if anything, really happened without a time machine. The Gnostics had various views of Jesus which differed from the 'orthodox opinion' so where did they get their ideas from?