Unfortunately my every experience on Wikipedia concords with your assessment. Sometimes when I go to the Talk sections to discuss potential changes, I realise I’m dealing with zealots and ideologues much more intent on controlling the articles than I am. Sad that some people really cannot (or refuse to) fathom that there are alternatives to their views, or that even simply mentioning relevant/prominent alternative views (without justifying them) can be valuable and informative too. Even when I’m on the same side as the zealots, I find myself frustrated by their attitude.

Probably a matter of days.

Wikipedia articles are often controlled by troll farms who regularly monitor changes (indeed, they get emailed every change).

That’s why getting a Wikipedia article to tell the truth is often difficult to impossible, because it requires months of dogged combat to get changes to survive trollvisions, and hardly anyone has the energy to commit to that. The trolls thus usually win.

They lose only on articles they have no interest in (which is, admittedly, by far most articles on Wikipedia) or that are controlled by dogged industries opposed to them (e.g. math-science stuff) or where there are massive special interests involved (e.g. anything to do with Israel or Palestine).

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.