You must be new to this. You evidently don’t know what the thesis is. Only one theory of the origins of Christianity has passed peer review in a hundred years: the view that he was given a mortal (even, in some sense, Jewish and Davidic) body to die in—a real, actual, human body, not a “symbolic” or “spiritual” one—but that this was originally believed to have occurred in a supernatural realm (celestial or otherwise). He then acquired a spiritual body at his resurrection. So, I fully agree Paul understood Jesus to have temporarily become a mortal human. That is in fact Paul’s entire point about how Jesus worked his mojo (see Philippians 2:6-11). To catch up on what we are talking about, read Can Paul’s Human Jesus Not Be a Celestial Jesus?

The reason actually being born to a biological woman isn’t relevant is thus that Paul is not talking about women, but conceptual abodes. We are not born to Hagar or Sarah, either. He outright says these are allegorical women he is talking about, not real women. They represent modes of being: to enter existence with a mortal body, and thus be subject to corruption, temptation, and death, is to be “born of Hagar,” while relocating to a spiritual body immune to those things (per 1 Corinthians 15:35-55 and 2 Corinthians 5:1-10) is to be “born of Sarah.”

So this does not tell us how someone acquires a mortal body. Maybe Paul thought Jesus acquired his by being born; maybe he thought he acquired it by God simply making one for him (like God did for Adam, and will do for us at the resurrection). But we can’t tell from what he is saying here, because Paul isn’t talking about literal wombs and vaginas at all, but merely the figurative concept of coming to inhabit a mortal body.

This is why it is peculiar that when he speaks of Jesus, he says Jesus “came to be” (was made) from a woman, yet when speaking of the rest of us, he says “born to” (begotton of). See Yes, Galatians 4 Is Allegorical and Empirical Logic and Romans 1:3. At worst this suggests Paul thinks Jesus came to be this way in some different way than we did. But even at best, it does not tell us what he thought either way.

So, either way, that means we can’t use this verse to prove Paul believed in a historical Jesus. It doesn’t say anything that would tell us what he thought about that.

Because Paul outright says he is speaking of mothers allegorically here, not literally. Which fact in itself is evidence against his believing in a Jesus born to a real mother; had he thought that, it’s hard to see why he would need this convoluted allegorical discourse about mothers (why not just talk about actual mothers?). But however one explains why Paul does that, the effect is the same: since he isn’t speaking literally, he is giving us no information about how he really thought Jesus was mechanically transported into a mortal body.

So this verse is unusable as evidence—for or against the historicity of Jesus.

The only thing that matters here is whether a theory has a vanishingly small probability and thus isn’t worth considering. Quantum resurrections qualify. Semantic games about what to call a “miracle” cannot escape that fact, the only fact relevant here.

I can see where “truly been resurrected” might imply (as I meant it to) to be a resurrection of a human corpse, such that it would no longer be confined to it’s final resting place.

Whether that’s a “miracle” (or not) is someone’s after-the-fact assessment of it. Just exactly like every miracle claim (if one decides to call this-or-that a miracle). Someone else might simply call it an “inexplicable anomaly of nature”, and say “we can’t explain it — yet” (we must always remember to tag on “yet”, exuding confidence that science will be able to explain it sooner or later).

Neither I nor you know how the universe works, and neither does anyone else. We know what we know, and it’s a tiny fraction of “all things knowable”. If I thought the universe was static, I might be inclined to agree with Hume, but alas… it is not.

So, I totally disagree with your assessment that a “true resurrection” (aka, “literal, bodily resurrection of a human being) HAS to be a miracle or involve a supernatural. Granted, if such a “literal, bodily” resurrection occurred, it would certainly be claimed a miracle by some. But, that doesn’t necessarily make it so,

I totally “get” your need to complete rule out any possibility of a “real resurrection” (“literal, bodily”). It MUST be that the “resurrection” (of Jesus) was one of some other type of resurrection apart from “bodily, literal resurrection of a human corpse”, but moreover, the claim itself of that resurrection had to be of something besides a “literal, bodily resurrection of a human corpse” in order for your theory to work. So, I appreciate all the work you’ve put into your concept.

I’ve read your book (OHJ) – or, at least, most of it – but remain unconvinced that Paul was talking about anything other than a literal, bodily resurrection of a human corpse. Note Carefully: I’m not saying that such a resurrection actually took place. I’m saying I’m still convinced that that’s what Paul was talking about.

If you wish, you may have the last word. I’m bowing out…

BTW – I’ve enjoyed reading your book….

I commented that “IF (capital “IF”) Jesus had truly been resurrected [corrected spelling] in an historical event — “this-world, this-time-and-space” – then it would nothing to do what anyone “conceived”, would it?”

And as I explained, this hypothetical is moot. The condition is false. So the consequent never matters to anything.

You evidently assumed I was talking about something “supernatural” or “miraculous”. I was not. I said nothing about those particular qualities.

Yes you did. It’s stated in the condition (the protasis of your conditional). There is no “truly been resurrected” other than supernaturally/miraculously.

According to Dr Tim Anderson, Principle Research Scientist at Georgia Tech, “Quantum scrambling could lead to resurrection of the dead”.

That is not quite what he said. He isn’t talking about the resurrection of Jesus, but Boltzmann resurrection (without calling it that) of people generally, which requires countless trillions of years passing between death and “resurrection” to have any chance of occurring (hence his point that “head death” might end the universe before that could happen) or an intelligent cause (his point about “the correct circumstances” being required, e.g. a teleporter, as he explains earlier on).

But that doesn’t matter. A random quantum resurrection, just like one produced by space aliens or time travelers, is the same thing as a miracle. Any thesis requiring a vastly improbable premise is itself vastly improbable. And the quantum event required here (or the required cause of it) is vastly improbable. That’s the whole point of rejecting the miraculous: it’s too improbable to credit. So we don’t credit it. Hence your conditional is moot. Exactly as I explained.

re: “If Jews would never conceive of it, Christianity would never have happened-because Christianity obviously began within sectarian Judaism”.

I fully understand that your theory is that the disciples of Jesus believed in an Outer Space Jesus, and a resurrection somewhere in the “heavenlies”. They weren’t proffering a “Witnessed Resurrection” (commonly called a “bodily” or “literal” resurrection). What they conceived of was something that had it’s roots somewhere in sectarian Judaism.

However, I commented that “IF (capital “IF”) Jesus had truly been resurrected [corrected spelling] in an historical event — “this-world, this-time-and-space” – then it would nothing to do what anyone “conceived”, would it?”

You evidently assumed I was talking about something “supernatural” or “miraculous”. I was not. I said nothing about those particular qualities.

According to Dr Tim Anderson, Principle Research Scientist at Georgia Tech, “Quantum scrambling could lead to resurrection of the dead”. He says “…it appears that the scrambling theory offers a genuine method for resurrection because it involves disassembly, scattering, and reconstruction of quantum information that could hypothetically constitute a person. While technology may not be able to achieve it, perhaps the universe can.”

My point in my original statement was that IF (even if via quantum scrambling) a resurrection had occurred as an historical event — THEN your comment that “If Jews would never conceive of it, Christianity would never have happened-because Christianity obviously began within sectarian Judaism” –was an overstatement.

Unless we can rule out the “quantum scrambling” idea altogether, then I’d stick with my assessment that you’re making an overstatement. IF Jesus was resurrected via (for example) quantum scrambling, THEN, that resurrection had no dependencies whatsoever on any “conceptions” they might have previously held.

Your comment was wordy but only made one point. I responded to the single point it made. There is no other point there to answer.

Maybe you miswrote what you meant to ask. Feel free to try again.

Why are you bothering taking one statement out of my message, ignoring the rest of it, and treating it – totally out of it’s context – as if it were the question at hand????

Your response doesn’t address any concern (at all) that I tried to express.

But, thanks for the response.

Continuing my backlog:

IF (capital “IF”) Jesus had truly been resurrection in an historical even — “this-world, this-time-and-space” – then it would nothing to do what anyone “conceived”, would it?

I am not sure what you mean.

It sounds like you are saying “if Jesus was actually resurrected, then that more likely happened on Earth.” That isn’t necessarily true (it “could” be that the Doherty thesis is true, as in, Jesus really was resurrected…in outer space; that it wasn’t just a belief they had).

But that doesn’t matter to OHJ’s thesis, because as I explain in chapter 2, I rule out of court all supernaturalist, triumphalist narratives for Christianity. They are too wildly improbable to have any credible chance of being true. The supernatural simply doesn’t exist. People don’t get resurrected. Hence I only take seriously mainstream historical Jesus theories.

If you want to tackle that question, you are no longer in the mainstream of history, but in apologetics. Then what you need to read is not OHJ, but Not the Impossible Faith and Why I Am Not a Christian and Sense and Goodness without God.

Sorry for the delay in answering this. In future, keep in mind, lengthy comments take a long time to read and often to address, so they go to the bottom of the moderation queue. If you want faster replies here, you might want to post shorter comments.

Doesn’t the fact that Mark, Matthew, Luke and John were all written during that period tell us at least something of what was going on?

That depends on what you mean by “tell” us things. We can learn or infer things, often with great uncertainty owing to the lack of direct material. But here I’m referring to direct histories and memoirs and letters, e.g. actual narratives or discussions about the writing of the Gospels, developments in the church, debates and conflicts, etc. We don’t even have an account of when any of those Gospels were written (much less where or by whom or even for whom). We have to guess; and only get to probable termini in a very wide range of dates.

There is, for example, no Book of Acts for the period from the 60s to the 130s (Christian “history” picks up in fragments again only in the 140s, e.g. with polemical histories of Marcion written decades later; there is no real narrative though until Eusebius, and everything he writes about that same earlier period is fabricated; so even he didn’t know of any records, letters, or histories for that period to get information from).

There are also no letters, like Paul’s or even Clement’s, which I assume a traditional date for in what you quote but you’ll notice I go on to argue that date is impossible: Clement wrote in the 60s. The first “letters” after Paul/Clement are those of Ignatius (the pre-redacted set), which were dated to the 110s but most experts now place them to…surprise…the 140s. There are no memoirs either. Or straight documents (like church records, which we have fragments of from the late second/early third century).

So, for instance, we can infer that Matthew was written by Jewish Christians who disagreed with Mark and wanted to rewrite it to be less Pauline; ergo there must have been some conflict still between those two factions of churches in that blackout period. Hence I mention these documents: I note they are the only exception we have, and that still isn’t much, because they only write explicitly about events half a century before.

For example, even regarding that one inference, neither Matthew nor Mark outright tell us anything about that conflict. Since everything they say is set in the 30s AD; they narrate nothing for any later decade; there are no digressions or asides commenting on events in the church in their own day; so we know next to nothing about this, just vague minimal things like “there were still Jewish Christians arguing with deutero-Pauline Christians” which is not very much to go on.

I discuss what is missing and the significance of that in Chapter eight of OHJ. You might want to review that.

how is it that Mark had Paul’s letters – especially so soon after Paul died

This doesn’t make sense as a question. It’s obvious Mark is writing from the Pauline sect and reasonably soon after Paul’s death. Paul’s inherited corpus obviously was in his community. This is how it survived to even end up in the NT at all.

…and yet, knew nothing about the Outer Space Jesus?

You are confusing different things here.

Mark conceals Paul’s cosmic Jesus (even the one the mainstream consensus agrees was central to the faith: the pre-existent creator Jesus and the celestial risen Jesus sending revelations from on high) in his allegory. So we don’t expect Mark to ever explicitly mention it; he’s creating an allegory for it, not a narrative of it. This is true even if Jesus existed (the pre-existent cosmic Jesus was already attached to the historical Jesus across all of Paul’s letters, and thus Mark well knew this, so its absence from his Gospel is deliberate, and we know why: just as with Osiris, this is how gospels got written about celestials).

And we don’t have Mark’s dossier of Paul’s letters. We have a heavily edited collection with tons missing in the NT several lifetimes later. For example, Paul refers in 1 Corinthians to a previous letter he wrote them (and that’s not the only example; this is discussed in OHJ). Mark probably had that letter. We don’t. Likewise, something was removed between the end of 1 Cor 8 and the beginning of 1 Cor 9 (the argument Paul is responding to in the latter would have been raised and briefed in that missing material). And so on.

So we can’t say what “wasn’t” in Mark’s copy of Paul’s letters. We don’t have it. We have something else, that has been edited by later post-Ignatian historicists, who wouldn’t of course keep material they didn’t like (as obviously they cut a lot and thus didn’t like a lot).

But also, there is no reason to expect it in Paul’s letters because no historical Jesus existed then for him to disprove. That was invented later. So the need for records documenting that that guy didn’t exist also didn’t exist before the Gospels, and Paul was long dead by then. He won’t have anticipated the need to combat a sectarian heresy he never foresaw even the possibility of (after all he expected the world to end in his own lifetime).

Maybe if we had the full original dossier we’d get lucky and some of the stuff cut by NT Christians would include clearer references to the specifics of their creed, but there is no particular reason to expect that—we already have numerous casual such references (everything I document in chapter eleven of OHJ)—other than the fact that historicists destroyed it (which indeed adds to the probability it contained some more explicit such references).

For example, maybe Paul went into more detail about the actual narrative content behind the creed in Philippians 2. But that would require some question about it to have come up, which would have to be a chance accident for us. No one would ask about it to combat a historicist heresy, because that didn’t exist yet. So there would have to have been some other occasional reason to ask about it.

This is unlike historicity which creates so many essential stories and questions that it is impossible no occasion ever came up to discuss any of it (as discussed in ch. 11). Mythicism is already occasionally mentioned many times by everything Paul says, e.g. it is only modern historicists who “read into” Phil. 2 anything historicizing; the hymn itself never mentions any earthly sojourn or ministry (and even denies any miracle working when Jesus was incarnate, by saying he became a slave to the world order, not a master of it). No one would think to ask, “wait, do you mean he was or wasn’t on earth?” There would never be an occasion for that to be in question then.

…certainly claims Jesus’ humanity…

Mythicism also claims Jesus’s humanity. He not only became human to die, but assumed a human body of Jewish Davidic flesh. The only question is where.

This suggests you don’t understand the thesis. Re-read the last half of Ch. 3. Or read this.

As to the verses declaring this beyond those already covered in OHJ ch. 11, see here.

What we DON’T have is any indication from Paul that he ever refuted the “historicists” — we see nothing like “how is it that some of you are saying that Jesus lived on earth?”, or “…that Jesus’ corpse vacated a tomb?”

There can’t possibly have been historicists then. See my discussion of this at the end of Ch. 3, where I show why we have to assign that a near zero probability, such that in fact if we had evidence of such going on, that would be strong evidence for historicity.

So your concerns seem not to understand the historical facts or the theory. This is easily remedied by a more careful reading of OHJ (or its summary Jesus from Outer Space).