Chap wrote:deacon blues wrote:Does Paul's reference to Jesus in 1st Corinthians count as a 1st century reference? Why or why not? Perhaps what I'm asking is- do we presume 1st Corinthians is a first century source?
Good point. I have never yet encountered anybody who doubts that there was a historical Saul of Tarsus who was the author of at least some of the Pauline letters. And the author of those letters seems pretty convinced that Jesus was around some time in his own lifetime.
SteelHead wrote:
And yet Saul.... never met Jesus before his death.
Not a primary source, now is he?
Of course he isn't a
first-hand witness to Jesus the historically existing human being.
But given that he is a person of (so far as I am aware) pretty well undoubted historicity, who was very likely to have been an adult when Jesus was active c. 30-33 CE, and was educated in Jerusalem, and given that he clearly believes that Jesus was a real person who had lived, taught and died, and that he says he had met people who were Jesus's close associates, he makes it just a further degree difficult to believe that Jesus never existed at all.
Which is the point at issue in this thread, isn't it?
[Just reminding people: for me, Jesus was just a human being who ended up as the focus of a major branch of the Abrahamic religious movement. Just how that happened is likely to remain conjectural, given the state of the evidence. The religion that takes his name leaves me cold nowadays, although it is the one I was brought up in and that I have not neglected to think carefully about.
But that's not the same as thinking Jesus did not exist.]
