I'm glad you're so sure. I find admirable your unwavering firmness. But I think it is a bit too rocky. A little effort to understand the opposite point of view would do it more... I don't find the appropriate qualifying... I would say "intelligent" but I wouldn't like to be offensive. The damned limits of my poor English!
See Craig B's comment #4679. He answers you better I can do on this point.
This is the clue for my interpretation. Paul's theology is working in the middle of a variety of Christian currents which manifested themselves in oral mode. He picks up those that interested him or were so common that it was impossible do not take account of them. The crucifixion of a divine Master is so distant from the common religious world both of Judaism as Paganism that can't be "interesting" to invent to Paul or anybody in this time. So it is more natural to think that the early Chistianism is fighting bitterly with some biblical passages that obviously don't have the significance that Christians assign them, because they are trying to mask or to give sense to a non invented fact: the repugnant death of his leader.
Yes, you can imagine a collective insanity that makes that some strange individuals imagine from nothing a repugnant god. But this is so distant from the logic of the myths we know in the area and time we are speaking, that you must to present some evidence of this strange fact. Extraordinary facts need extraordinary proofs, you know. And you haven’t any evidence in that sense.Meanwhile you find this unlikely evidence, I continue accepting the usual norms to the formation of myths. And they say it is very likely that efforts to find implausible antecedents of the Jesus' death in the Old Testament are a clear indication that this was a real event.
David - well, first of all your English is fine (and if I had to write in your native language I'm sure my efforts would be far worse). However,
Craig make s no credible or coherent answer in #4679 ... the point that I am making, and this is really inescapable and unarguable, even though you and Craig and others on the HJ side here refuse to accept actual fact, is that Paul's letters repeatedly tell us that he (whoever the writer of
"Paul" really was) obtained his beliefs from
"no man", "not of human origin", but
"according to scripture" where he says
"it is written" and he knows this because he says
"God was pleased to reveal his Son in me" ...
... his letters could not be clearer in directly and explicitly stating that his beliefs about Jesus came to him from his vision, his communications with a heavenly God, and all the time through what he believed he had correctly understood as the true meaning
"hidden so long" in the scriptures ...
... It's 100% irrelevant that we know of no actual specific passage clearly predicting that a messiah will be named Jesus and will be crucified by Pontius Pilate. Paul did not need anything anywhere near as direct and specific as that. Paul was looking for any hint of anything which he thought could possibly be interpreted by him, to be referring to a messiah who in his vision he believed had been raised from death on the third day according to what he had found in the scriptures ... and you most definitely can find passages talking about someone being raised on the third day ... the point is that Paul convinced himself that God had revealed to him that such passages actually referred to the messiah named 1000 years before by Mosses as
"Yehoshua" ...
... in the same scripture Paul also found all sorts of passages talking about someone being
"hung on a tree", being
"pierced hand and foot" being
"rejected and passing misunderstood and unappreciated by his own Jewish people". You most definitely can find those passages in various books of the OT. They are there. And that is, afaik, and indisputable fact.
What you want to say is that those passages were not referring to a messiah and did not clearly describe a crucifixion etc. But that is 100% totally irrelevant! The crucial point is that Paul
believed those passages were in fact about the messiah ... he believed that the OT passages contained
"hidden" meaning about the messiah, and that he alone had finally understood that such passages actually revealed the persecution, death and resurrection of the messiah, because he believed that God had specially chosen him,
"Paul", as the one in whom
"God was pleased to reveal his Son in me", ie God had revealed to Paul the true hidden messiah meaning of the scripture.
I don't know how much clearer you want that to be or how much clearer you think Paul’s letters had to be, when they actually stress, repeatedly, that that is exactly how he obtained his belief in Jesus. i.e. it was
"from no man", it was
"not of human origin", it was from that which
"is written",
"according to scripture", and because he was specially empowered by God who granted him understanding of all this through his vision of Christ where
"God was pleased to reveal his Son in me" ... he means God gave him the special power to finally understand the true meaning of the OT messiah prophecies
"hidden so long" ...etc.
And to repeat again - at that time (1st century) it seems likely to me that Paul would probably have been relying mostly if not entirely on word of mouth legend of what people believed the scriptures said, rather than himself either being able to read, or in any case having available anything like a modern library with written bound volumes of all the original Hebrew books of the OT. In which case, if Paul was deducing things from what he had been told orally as the OT traditions interpreted, understood & believed by earlier generations of influential preachers, then he may have easily believed that the OT said or meant all sorts of things that it's actual original writing never explicitly contained.
And finally you also said this regarding the above -
" Extraordinary facts need extraordinary proofs, you know. And you haven’t any evidence in that sense."
That comment from you is not only manifestly untrue, it is in fact the precise opposite of the actual situation here. That is - as I have pointed out to you repeatedly -
1. Paul’s own words in his own letters specifically and repeatedly do say very clearly that he obtained his Jesus belief from the scriptures. So that is unarguable direct physically existing (as c.200AD copies on papyrus!)
evidence of where Paul got his beliefs.
2. Afaik, you most definitely can find all of those passages in the various books of the OT, and that again is not disputed by anyone. It's not merely even
"evidence", it's a fact!
It's a fact that the passages are there in the OT. Your only objection, which is a very weak one indeed, is that Paul was wrong if he thought these passages actually referred to a messiah. The point is that Paul DID think their true
"hidden" meaning was describing a messiah that God was
"pleased to reveal" to him, and his letters say exactly that, very explicitly and repeatedly.
.
.