OK, well I don’t want to spend much (if any) time debating a list of claims like that, but first of all -
Very kind of you
You think I should go over every claim you present in lists of claims, when we have already spent what must be around 500 pages now already going over all those same points at least 100 times (literally!), and where you have never been able to produce any credible evidence at all of a living HJ? You really think it’s a sensible use of peoples time to keep discussing that same lack of evidence and the same claims endlessly in all these numerous HJ threads (on RatSkep an identical HJ thread is now in it’s 4th year!)?
Sorry. It is not a list, but the premises of an argument with two linked conclusions.. ]
Of course it was a “List”. It was a list of about 10 items, the first 7 or so of which actually seemed to all be the same claim.
Liars and fanatics often are "very, very clear". May be Paul was a liar, a fanatic surely he was. So we need to "read between the lines" in search for some falsehood. I call it "to analyze" or "to interpret"; you call it "to guess". The fact is the same.
Why are you bothering to say the writer of Paul’s letters (“Paul”?) was a “Liar”? That’s pointless and deliberately misleading to claim the author was lying. You don’t know that he was lying at all. As far as the letters very clearly say - he simply believed that God had granted him a vision of the messiah that Jews had expected anyway for 1000 years, and thus
“revealed” to him the true messiah meaning
“hidden so long” in the scriptures.
That is not a “Lie”. That just says that the authors devout fanatical devotion to his religious beliefs led him to believe that God had specially chosen him to receive that revealed message through the grace of God.
Details: "and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born". 1 Cor 15
Good grief! How many times do you think we have been over the quotes of that exact passage in these threads? 100 times? 500 times?
That is to say, the order of preference of the persons who benefit the appearances of Jesus. (This is not without importance for early Christians as Crossan points out in Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography). The complement "according to the Scriptures" that go with the first two vesicles is omited in the rest. This signifies that Paul explicitly excludes them of the biblical origin. (It would be strange otherwise).
I don’t know what you mean by “vesicles”, but if you mean that Paul does not add the words “according to scripture” after every single mention he ever makes of anything we might now wish to discuss from each line in his letters 2000 years later, then that is clearly an absurd demand.
Be clear about what I had said to
Craig about that - I specifically did not say that Paul could not have discussed his religious beliefs with James, Cephas, Others, in Jerusalem. On the contrary I immediately said that (quoting from memory)
“of course Paul and the others may very well discussed their religious beliefs. But that is a million miles away from Craig’s insistence that those people had actually met a living Jesus and were thus the source of Paul’s knowledge of Jesus”.
So yes, of course, if Paul and the others discussed their messiah beliefs, then like Paul they may all have claimed to receive that grace of god granting them visions or “insights” of the messiah and scriptural meanings etc. That would hardly be surprising, because after all, even today, every single day you can find countless thousands of people who swear to have visions of God, Jesus, the Virgin Mary, the Devil etc. If people still claim that on a daily basis today, in a relatively well educated 21st century, then it's almost certain that in the highly ignorant times of the 1st century where everyone was positively drowning in religious superstition, the most fanatical believers like Paul and the leaders of the church would be constantly claiming all manner of visions and communications from God.
If someone like Paul said he had been chosen for such visions, then it’s obvious that other church leaders might very easily say that they too had experienced similar visions and similar insights from God.
It doesn’t automatically mean they were “Liars” in that crude direct sense. It just means that ultra-ignorant superstitious religious fanatics regularly believed that God was in contact through them. They believed that they had experienced all sorts of visions. They spoke “in tongues” for example, believing that was also some kind of God-given communication and insight.
Personal visions like that don’t have to be recorded in scripture from centuries before. Paul and the others simply believed that they were special in the hierarchy of the belief and that they could see or experience visions and hear the voice and revelations of the lord etc. They all wanted to say & believe that.
Paul doesn't say if these details come from revelation or not. But if we applied rational criticism here we should easily conclude that this cannot be possible. If revelation is understand as some kind of religious experience, the psychology says that religious experience has not definite contents (this is recognized by some orthodox exegetes as Dunn). Religious experience only confirms o rejects previous ideas. If religious experience adds no contents to the beliefs of whose that experiment it, then those specific details that Paul accounts have another different origin. Either a human source or they are simply invented by Paul, the liar.
The difficulty/emarrassment argument dismisses the second option. (I have explained this extensively before). We only get the human source.
OK, this is the same point that I have just dealt with at length above. Namely - claims of personal visions and personal insights from God don’t have to be written in scripture. Paul and the others simply believed that they were all in contact with God who granted them insightful visions and revelations of the messiah, which were confirmation of what they believed to be “hidden so long” in the scriptures.
I'm astonished that a hyper-positivist as you are can accept Paul's version of his quarrels with the Jerusalem circle as the only truth. Your naivety is astonishing!
Why do you say such a silly thing as that? I did not say anything of the kind. I did not say that I
“accept Paul's version of his quarrels with the Jerusalem circle as the only truth”. Where did I ever say any such thing? Can you quote me saying that, please?
What I have said about the Jerusalem meetings is only that Craig had no basis for continually insisting that James and Cephas and others had definitely known a living Jesus, and that that they must have been the source of Paul’s belief in Jesus. That claim from Craig is not supported by any known evidence at all. And it is in fact flatly and totally contradicted by all known evidence in P46 of Paul’s letters.
That’s what I actually said about it.
Crossan convincingly argues that Paul's allegation of "direct revelation" is a shield against the authoritative figures as Cephas, John and the brother of the Lord, because the hierarchy of power in the Early Christianity is at stake in the issue of appearances. With “direct revelation” Paul, a newly arrived, claims to be at the same level that they and the other apostles. It is a very plausible theory.
Please … Dominic Crossan is a total religious fanatic and former priest (iirc), who’s entire life from even earliest childhood has been spent absolutely drowning in religious belief. Please do not quote Crossan to us as any kind of objective neutral party on the issues of belief in Jesus historicity.
