Is Christianity based on older myths?

[Mister Agenda]

I don't know if you genuinely can't understand this point, or are being deliberately difficult because you desperately want to cling to your beliefs.

You seem to think that the initial reporting of events was absolutely especially totally true. The people who saw it not only told the absolute truth, but also understood everything that was happening, including correctly attributing supernatural causations. And not just that, but that the reports were passed on entirely accurately.

We wouldn't give anyone even today such credibility, why are you giving it to superstitious warmongers with an agenda? People make stuff up, people get deluded and people make up explanations. So what someone believes happened, and why it happened, is entirely irrelelevant if it cannot be independently demonstrated.

That is, if you care at all about the truth of the claims.

You seem to think that Paul was a generation removed from the events. He was not. He would have been a child or young man when Jesus died. He didn't get his info from the telephone game. He knew, met with, and corresponded with actual disciples of Jesus. So for your theory to work, the actual eyewitnesses to Jesus' life would have had to lie to Paul who passed it on in his letters. The eyewitnesses also wrote letters (at least John, Peter, and James' survived) where they lied.

It's amazing the detail of people's thoughts you get from their general statements. Nothing was said about Paul in particular at all, yet here you are telling robvalue what he thinks about that specific writer.

So your claim is that Paul had special access to second-hand knowledge of Jesus. That puts him ahead of the Gospel writers, so what are we to make of Paul's apparent ignorance of nearly every story about Jesus the Gospel writers recorded but the resurrection?

And Paul doesn't claim to have gotten his information from witnesses, he claims to have gotten it by direct revelation (Galatians 1:12).