Did King Arthur exist? It's a story. But it is believed by many to have some historical roots.
The same is true for Jesus. But all we really know about Jesus is that there were stories. That's it. Nothing else. Regardless of what historians accept as good evidence, what there is, is poor.
There are no writings about Jesus that were made concurrently with his life or really any time even close to his lifetime Paul's first epistle was written more than two decades after Jesus was reportedly crucified and Mark which is believed to be the first of the gospels was written four plus decades after his life. So what we have is a story that was told over and over again that eventually somebody decided to write down...maybe.
Could it be that Paul was just a master storyteller and found that this was a good way to make a living and others just took his story and embellished it?
Without wishing to disagree at all, but just for the sake of accuracy/clarity, and because there are people on this site who often read these threads but who rarely post anything, so that if nothing is said against any factual sounding comments then they may easily assume that that the comment is true or widely accepted as correct – but in fact we do not know when Paul's letters were written ... just to explain that for anyone who is not fully up-to-speed on this subject -
- the date given by all Biblical Scholars, and almost universally accepted even by sceptics such as Richard Carrier, G A Wells, Alvar Ellegard, Earl Doherty and others, is indeed around 50AD to about 59AD. However, we need to be clear that we do not actually have any such letters from anywhere near that date.
The earliest date we have for those letters is from Papyrus P46, which is typically dated circa.200AD. Some Biblical Scholars have suggested that P46 maybe slightly earlier than 200AD, however, others have said it might be considerably later.
But the essential point, especially for any readers here who might think the date of these letters (or the dates for canonical gospels) is fairly well established, is just to point out that the dates commonly given for any of this biblical writing are far from being well established. And in fact the earliest copies that we have and which actually exist, almost certainly all date from centuries after the believed lifetime of Jesus.
That's important for several reasons. Firstly, because the reason why Biblical Scholars try to insist on the earliest possible dates for gospels and letters, is because as soon as any such writing becomes removed from the events by more than about 50 years, the more rapidly it becomes unreliable as evidence for whatever it claims. And certainly, anything that is nearly 200 years & more after the events, has to be regarded with extreme caution.
Secondly – what we have as the Letters of Paul are 13 documents that were all once thought to have been written by Paul himself. However, it was later realised that only 6 or 7 of them were written in similar style as if from the same author (and the other 6 or 7 appeared to be from various different writers). From that it was apparently concluded that the 6 or 7 in the same style were all written by Paul. However, there is of course no evidence for that. It is just as likely that those 6 or 7 were written by some other person, and that only one of the the remaining letters was actually by Paul (or maybe more than one, or maybe none at all from Paul).
We could of course add that its' clear from the letters that Paul had never met any living Jesus. And that nowhere does he actually mention anyone else that had ever claimed to have met a living Jesus … both Paul himself, and anyone else Paul mentions in the letters, are only ever said to have known Jesus from religious visions of a heavenly spiritual figure that had risen from the dead. That does of course leave the famous half-sentence where in one of the letters the writer says “other apostles saw I none, save James the Lords brother” … but I'll leave any debate about that for another time (we have discussed it literally thousands of times before).
But it is those letters, as weak and seriously unreliable as they clearly are, that are counted as almost certainly the best evidence anyone has for a historical Jesus.
