User:TheologyJohn/JesusMythPaul

The New Testament epistles
It is widely held that the authentic letters of Paul of Tarsus are the earliest surviving Christian writings. However, the epistles ascribed to Paul contain few references to Jesus' actual life and ministry, many aspects of which are only described in detail in the Gospels. There are a variety of explanations for this among those who believe in a historical Jesus, while proponents of the Jesus as Myth theory regard it as evidence to support this position.

G. A. Wells notes this apparent ignorance of the 'historical' Jesus in all the Pauline epistles except for the Pastorals, as well as in Hebrews, James, 1 Peter, the Johannine epistles and Revelation. He argues that in those references to Jesus that do occur within these works, he is presented as "a basically supernatural personage only obscurely on Earth as a man at some unspecified period in the past".[4] Wells considers this to be the original Christian view of Jesus, based not on the life of a historical figure but on the personified figure of Wisdom as portrayed in Jewish wisdom literature.

A more radical position is taken by Earl Doherty, who holds that these early authors did not believe that Jesus had been on Earth at all. He argues that the earliest Christians accepted a Platonic cosmology that distinguished a "higher" spiritual world from the Earthly world of matter, and that they viewed Jesus as having descended only into the "lower reaches of the spiritual world".[5] Doherty also argues that this view was accepted by the authors of the Pastoral epistles, 2 Peter and various second-century Christian writings outside the New Testament. Doherty contends that those references in the undisputed epistles that appear to refer to events on earth, and a physical historic Jesus, should instead be regarded as allegorical metaphors.[6] Opponents regard such interpretations as forced and erroneous.[7]