Ian
Professor Martin is real enough but he is a teacher of religion, with a Christian focus based upon a Christian education.
Based on remarks he made throughout his NT History and Literature course (still free online, and I recommend it to anybody who's interested), he's had quite the journey of faith. On information and belief, he is on record in favor of a historical Jesus.
http://religiousstudies.yale.edu/martin
Piggy
As we've seen, this notion is implausible on its surface, because Paul's letters spend a great deal of time defending his version of the religion against competing versions,...
Against incompatible teachings. We don't know that what they were teaching, so we don't know that it's another version of "the" religion. We do know, however, that Paul teaches that his visions of Jesus and God made up
his religion, so what Paul teaches does quite plainly originate inside his skull, or with supernatural agents who visited there.
Paul says that he did not defer to the James Gang. He called them "pillars" as part of complimenting himself on his selectivity on whom he deems worthy to discuss his religion with, apart from paying customers.
It's also not plausible that all of Paul's letters are faked, because they have been subject to decades of close scrutiny by scholars in a variety of fields,...
At least three are obvious fakes, and they survived scrutiny for more than a thousand years. It's amazing what you can overlook when your standard for scholarship is "if we don't assume this stuff is genuine, then we can't get anywhere."
if all of the Pauline epistles are fake, then there goes any hope of any evidence showing that Paul invented anything.
If so, then why would we care about "Paul" at all any more? We would know that
somebody made up the religion, whoever faked the founding documents of it, Paul's supposed (by hypothesis) letters.
5. Early Xianity was a kind of proto cargo cult.
To get any traction with this notion, proponents would have to explain why no early Christians espouse the notion that following rituals would lead to future wealth, but instead universally embraced the idea that being humble and kind would cause God to save them from the coming wrath.
I don't recall that
max or anybody else proposed examination of cargo cults except as admissible parallels, which they are, if Festinger's analysis of failed prophecy cults are admissible, as you have introduced them.
What Paul promised wasn't wealth or anything like "mercy." He promised immortality, freedom from the need for wealth, and the ability to fly. Meanwhile, his customers could see for themselves that the Paul Method imparted instant knowledge of foreign languages, both speaking and translating, visions of the future, and at least the occasional out of body experience. In other words, the perceived rewards for participating in church activites were immediate, not only something postponed.
...scam...
To support ths idea, we'd need to see some profit motive -- the collection for the poor and Paul's appeal for help with missions won't suffice because both of these are consistent with HJ theory -- and we'd need some plausible explanation for why a group of scammers would be in such disagreement about the basic tenets of the scam, not to mention why the early writings appear to be centrally concerned with dogmas which in no way profit the group leaders.
These points have already been addressed at length by several posters here. Paul did take money, and Paul did not deliver on his promise that his customers would fly.
The only open questions are whether that was his intention and if so, whether he had sufficient mental health to form a criminal intention. Of the two, the latter would plainly be the more difficult to establish.
) and his successor Saint Simeon of Jerusalem is not appointed till after the siege of Jerusalem ie 70 CE
