I don’t “have” to do anything but report the facts. And the facts are as I just reported. Those facts entail “brother of the Lord” is indeterminate at best (we cannot discern that it ever meant a biological relationship in Paul) and damning at worst (per the conjoint probability, it is logically necessarily the case that it is more likely Paul would note the distinction between biological and fictive brothers of the Lord if he intended or even knew of one). That’s a fact. Not a theory.

Likewise that the only sources of data Paul refers to anyone having were revelation and scripture. That’s a fact. Not a theory.

And so on.

So maybe you are not understanding what I am saying, or not reading the material I am referring you to.

You seem to think I’m just making this up. I’m not. It’s an objectively observable fact of the material we have. I’m just the messenger. You’re the one arbitrarily rejecting objective data here. And you might want to ask yourself why you are doing that.

“So any unbiased reading of the letters would get to my theory, not yours.”

Yeh, I see you SAYING that. I just can’t figure out how you thing YOUR reading us “unbiased”.

You blow off the Gospels as “historical”, so do I.

You read Paul’s letters, so do I.

But, you have to assert that James WASN’T Jesus, brother, that Josephus’ references to Jesus weren’t what I (and, from what I can tell, a whole lot of other historians) think they are, you have to dismiss “born of a woman”, but I don’t have to bother with that dismissal, you have to claim that everything Paul knew about Jesus was known “by revelation”, I don’t have to bother with that, either. (I could go on, but I won’t).

I just find it much easier to believe that there was a first-century Jew named Jesus who (like every human being) had a mom, and a sibling (or a few of them), and that this particular Jesus was crucified, then believed (by some) to have been raised from the dead. And, once that resurrection (or, “believed” resurrection) occurred, other things were added to the story.

I guess I’m just saying: You cover things remarkably well in OHJ, but, what i see is ultimately, you’ve just created a “Gospel According to Carrier”. That’s what OHJ is, ultimately: it’s your narrative about “Jesus”.

The problem is that I just can’t give your narrative any more credence than I do the narratives found in The Gospels. That’s all.

Actually, if all we had were the letters, there would be no earthly ministry at all. Jesus would first have been seen after his death (that’s what 1 Cor 15 says) and only in revelations (that’s what Gal 1 and Rev 16:25-26 and even Rom. 10:14-15 say). That would clinch it.

Then we’d notice all baptized Christians were brothers of the Lord (which also re-frames what Josephus supposedly said); only Jesus’s body is said to have been made of Davidic flesh, which matches the prophecy Paul is riffing on there more perfectly if that was direct and not by descent, and Paul even says that was by God’s manufacture, not descent, which makes less sense for a terrestrial man. Even the meal does not mention any friends present and is identified as a vision, just as with everything else (Paul received that information directly from the Lord, and Jesus is there speaking to all future Christians and not just a gathered few). And so on.

I’ve covered all this. Every single thing you mention is addressed in my original study, and again on my blog many times.

When we look at the evidence without bias (which we would not have without the Gospels), we don’t get your result. Every single thing you refer to (in addition to the above) falls apart on inspection: the exact text and context is weird on your theory; but makes perfect sense on mine. So any unbiased reading of the letters would get to my theory, not yours. That’s the entire point of my study’s argument.

That’s why you need to learn a simple lesson: when it comes to Jesus, Things Fall Apart When You Check.

So you have to check.

If we were in a World Without Christianity (because that “belief system”, whatever it was, never took root), and archeologists dug up the seven authentic Pauline Epistles (which I’ll just call the Pauline Epistles moving ahead), then we’d see Jesus was born of a woman, born under the law, he had a brother named James, was a human being (Paul says the grace of God came into the world through one “anthropo”, the Greek word for “human”, or more broadly, for “person”, whether male or female). We’d see he’d had a meal with some friends, and said (paraphrase), “this bread is my body, this wine is my blood” – indicating Jesus was a human being of body and blood.

AND – we’d see scriptures that spoke of the pre-existence of Christ, and how “all things were created through him and for him” (paraphrase). This “Son of God” was sent to earth. And, of course, we’d see that the post-resurrection Jesus was back in heaven, I suppose sitting at the right hand of God, exalted.

What would some body make of all this?

A narrative could be created which said “Messiah existed from the beginning, and at the right time, God sent Messiah (his Son) to earth, where he was born of a woman, born a Jew of Davidic lineage, etc,. THEN, we could make up a bunch of stuff: “While he was on earth, he walked on water and fed 5000 people on a really tight food budget, and head people, and said some good stuff” — and got crucified, and then was raised from the dead, and returned to heaven, his work on earth completed. But, he reigns in heaven as Lord, and will again return to earth at the Last Day”.

OR – we can make up a narrative that says “Jesus existed in heaven, and battled the evil forces there, and was crucified by demons, and raised from the dead on the far side of the moon” — and, oh, Paul didn’t really mean Jesus was “born of a woman”, and he didn’t really mean Jesus was a Jew, and he really didn’t mean” Jesus was a human being (despite using the word “anthropo”), and he didn’t really *mean Jesus had a brother named James, and later on, when Josephus says “Jesus, the so-called Christ had a brother named James” (paraphrase), the phrase “so-called Christ” was an interpolation, and …. so on and so on and so on.

What we’ve got, then, is a narrative created about Jesus AFTER his death and resurrection, which might well be exaggerated and outlandish and totally non-historical — that of The Gospels.

OR, we have this OTHER narrative, which is TOTALLY speculative, and requires all kinds of whacked-out work-arounds and denials of things that Paul (and later, Josephus) said in order to make it work.

Which one should I choose????

Neither of them. The picture that Paul presents us with is of an historical Jesus who died, and was believed to have been raised from the dead, and AFTERWARD (and because of the belief that Jesus was resurrected), people started saying other things about Jesus – like, he was sent by God, he existed from the beginning, and he’s returned to God and has been pronounced Lord.

But, I can’t give any more “historical credence” to Mythicism than I can to the stories in The Gospels.

Compare the NIV translation:

Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin. Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.

The actual literal Greek of the key phrase means “tempted in the same way,” as in, “we are tempted, and he was tempted, and so he is like us,” i.e. not that we are tempted in every possible way (only he was), since obviously our temptations are contingent and random; whereas he was tempted to literally every possible thing any human could ever have been tempted to in all of history, thus there is no human who has been tempted in some way he was not, so he is alike to all humans in that way.

In other words, the sentence is not saying we are tempted in every possible way, but that he was. And the sentence is not saying he is like us in that (he obviously cannot be, because no human being is tempted “in every possible way”), but that he is like us in having been tempted yet resisting that temptation. He is even greater than us, because he resisted every temptation (a test no human has ever endured); but this makes him more like us in the sense that there is no human who has ever been tempted in any way he wasn’t, and so he achieved homoiotês to every possible human.

So, because Jesus had every temptation (there is no temptation he did not resist), he well can sympathize with all humans who face these temptations themselves. Hence, Jesus resisted even becoming a wanton god (he made the opposite decision to Satan), so he can certainly sympathize with someone who was faced with a hunger for bacon or picking up sticks on Saturday. He isn’t, thus, some alien being who has never known temptation and thus cannot even empathize with puny humans.

“we don’t have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has been tested according to everything, in the same way, without sin.”

You suggest :

“His temptation “concerning everything” is most likely what is simply stated in Phillipians 2:6-8: he was tempted to acquire all the power of God and declare himself his equal”

Except that doesn’t seem very consistent with that sentence. The expression seems pretty clear that the author is saying we have a representative/high priest/whatever that can sympathize with our weakness, who has been tested, “in the same way” without sin. What you describe certainly doesn’t seem to fit with “in the same way” as the author (or the collective we they are representing) and also seems to conflict with the whole premise it starts with, that they do have someone who can sympathize with them.

Translations conceal the actual Greek: Paul says “like an abortion.” More specifically he means a miscarriage, something monstrous and rejected. He immediately explains why he says this, so there is no mystery to it:

…and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born. For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them

In other words, God chose him even though he was a rejected monster: he persecuted the church; now he works harder as a missionary than those he once persecuted.

There is nothing here about wishing he’d met Jesus. It’s that he used to do harm to the mission he now embraces, yet God chose him anyway.

The NIV translation “abnormally born” is closer to his meaning (there is nothing here about being “untimely” born; that is a delicate English way of saying “miscarried,” and yet refers to being born too early—not too late; so Paul is not referring to that aspect, but the rejection/monstrosity aspect). See the interlinear.

Paul states that he was untimely born when discussing all that had seen the risen Christ. To me, it seems Paul is saying it’s unfortunate he didn’t meet Jesus like the others he listed. How do you explain Paul’s statement?

As the article you are commenting on here points out, remember the print edition of On the Historicity of Jesus has a scripture index. So you can always check questions like this there. But for the most important discussion see chapter 11.9, which lists this and several parallel verses and addresses what’s ambiguous about them.

You can see here how the Greek is far more ambiguous than most English translations represent. Minimal mythicism proposes that it was believed from reading it out of scripture that God made a body for Jesus out of Jewish, Davidic flesh (or else declared the flesh he made to simply be thus), to fulfill prophecy and God’s cosmic plan. That doesn’t tell us where God made this body for him or where it died or was buried. Only that he needed one to die in, in order to defeat the Devil (which even historicists, like Bart Ehrman, agree is what the first Christians believed about the incarnation).

More on this point here.