Fine. Why don't you deal with this evidence: Somehow, the Christian religion latched onto Jewish prophecy and Jewish apocalypticism. If Christianity was begun in Egypt in the second century by people who had nothing to do with Jewish religious belief, how and why did the practitioners of this cult go out of their way to identify their Christos with Jesus? Why did the gospel writers see having him fulfill Jewish messianic prophecies as being so important?
I have repeatedly asked you these questions. You have yet to answer.
Tim - leaving aside anything
dejudge may have said about Egypt or whatever (I have not read those posts), it's quite silly to ask people to dream up reasons for why Paul thought the messiah was named Yehoshua (Jesus), because there might be all sorts of reasons why he was preaching that particular name.
For a start, that particular "name", actually it's more a "word", has a theophoric meaning and iirc, although people argue over it's possible different meanings and interpretations, it was a traditional vocal utterance or cry invoking a saving appeal to Yahweh. That is - the word "Yehoshua", as spoken, was a religious vocal cry to the saving nature of God .... meaning something like
"we cry out our appeal to our saviour Yahweh".
But also, as pointed out before, way back in the earliest beliefs of the Hebrew OT, there is apparently a prophecy from Moses himself, saying that his successor will lead the Jewish people to God's promised success and that his succeeding leader will be called "Yehoshua" (ie Jesus!). So you can even find that precise name itself in the promises of the OT (I gave the reference before, several times ... I really don't want to waste even more time in threads like this repeatedly giving the same references and the same explanations).
But even simpler that that; it should be perfectly obvious that at time when Jewish beliefs in a messiah were rife, and when those beliefs and interpretations of the OT were changing (as appears quite certain from the DSS, which shows a range of preaching about the promised messiah, which was changing from the more traditional view of a human regal or military leader in the family line of King David … who apparently, himself probably did not even exist anyway!), it should be obvious that amongst many hundreds of street preachers before Paul, a theophoric name like Yehosha, possibly even predicted by Moses in the OT, may easily have appeared simply through rumours and story telling … eg at some point one or more preachers, wanting to put a name to the messiah they were preaching about, simply said he would be called “Yehosua” “we cry our appeal to our saviour Yahweh” … and other’s then started to say that they had heard that the messiah would be named “Yehoshua” … afaik, all throughout mans history, false rumours like that have arisen, with names of non-existent people, simply because somewhere in the origins of the story telling, someone starts to say they have heard about a person named X who did something amazing … and then the rumour gets repeated, sometimes it dies out and sometimes it doesn’t.
So those are three fairly obvious ways in which a specific name or word like Yehoshua may have become known to Paul, or believed by Paul, to be the name of a messiah who Paul had never known, and in whom he believed, as his letters constantly tell us, due to what he called “revelations” from God or from the Lord, and from “scripture” and from what he said was “written”. He obviously means that he believes this to have been the true message and meaning from the Old Testament.
But just because Paul named the messiah as Yehoshua, does not mean that there must have been a real living person named Yehoshua (you cannot argue that just because we have a name or word, that means a real person must have existed). And certainly Paul never knew who this figure Yehoshua was.
Paul also makes clear that whatever he thought of any earlier Jewish sect preaching any similar story (and by the way the DSS Essene community in that same region were preaching a not very dissimilar story from as much as 200 years before Paul, ie from c.170BC all through to c.70AD), he says that he did not get any of his Jesus story/beliefs/preaching from any of those people, ie
“from no mortal man”, but instead purely from his reliance upon scripture, as
“it is written” (he means
"foretold”), and from what he calls “
revelation" and
“revealed” (he seems to mean by that, what was he thought was being revealed to him both in visions and revealed from his understanding of scripture).
