(No Subject)  

The Christians citing Acts to "prove" Paul thought of Jesus as a real person aren't really helping. Acts was written by someone else who did think of Jesus that way, so of course he's going to depict his hero as doing so.

The question seems to be inspired by a version of the fringe Jesus Myth hypothesis, namely the one presented by amateur writer Earl Doherty and recently championed by PhD graduate and anti-Christian activist Richard Carrier. Doherty argues that the first form of Christianity didn't believe he was a historical figure at all and imagined he lived in the heavens - in the "sub-lunar celestial sphere", to be precise. According to Doherty, Paul's writings reflect this belief in a purely celestial Jesus and he had no conception of Jesus as an earthly, historical person. Then, Doherty argues, the mythic/celestial Jesus got "historicised" later and turned into a god-man who did things on earth, which is the Jesus we find in the gospels and Acts. The earlier "Celestial Jesus" proto-Christianity then faded away (vanished without trace, actually) and we were left with the historical god-man Jesus of the gospels. 

While this idea is strangely popular amongst internet atheists who have never studied the material, pretty much every scholar on the planet thinks it's hogwash.

To begin with, while Paul's letters put far more emphasis on what he believed about the risen Jesus and very little on the earthly Jesus he never met, there are clear references in his writings which make it obvious that he believed that Jesus had been a man, had taught, had been executed and had family and friends. It is extremely difficult for the "Jesus Myth" proponents to make these references go away.

Paul says Jesus was born as a human, of a human mother and born a Jew (Galatians4:4). He repeats that he had a "human nature" and that he was a human descendant of King David (Romans1:3). He refers to teachings Jesus made during his earthly ministry on divorce (1Cor. 7:10), on preachers (1Cor. 9:14) and on the coming apocalypse (1Thess. 4:15). He mentions how he was executed by earthly rulers (1Cor. 2:8) and that he died and was buried (1Cor 15:3-4). And he says he had an earthly, physical brother called James who Paul himself had met (Galatians1:19). Doherty and Carrier work very hard to try to argue that passages that say he was "born of a woman" actually mean "not born of a woman", but they have failed to convince scholars.

The second flaw in Doherty's thesis lies in his claim that this idea of "fleshly" events happening in some "sub-lunar" celestial realm up in the heavens was a common and accepted concept in the Middle Platonism of the time. He argues that if we look at the way Paul depicts Jesus (once we've argued away all the clear references to him being a human), we see exactly the kind of Middle Platonic conception of a celestial being in a "fleshly" yet non-terrestrial realm. Unfortunately, when he is pressed to provide actual examples of this, he comes up with nothing much to substantiate this claim. In fact, once when a knowledgeable online debater challenged him to provide some evidence that pagans actually believed in a sub-lunar, non-terrestrial realm where gods etc could "take on flesh", get crucified and die etc he admitted that he couldn't do so:

"I get the idea that you have interpreted me as though I were saying: the pagans placed the myths of their savior gods in the upper world, therefore we have good reason to interpret Paul that way. Actually, my movement was in the opposite direction. I have always worked first with the early Christian record, and come to a heavenly-realm understanding of it through internal evidence (supported by the unworkability of an earthly understanding of that record)"

This is an extraordinary admission by Doherty. His book argues that we can read Paul as believing in this "fleshly sub-lunar realm" because this can be found in Middle Platonic thought. But here he admits that he can't produce evidence that this idea existed in Middle Platonism because he's actually getting this whole idea from a reading of Paul that simply assumes this whole "fleshly sub-lunar realm" idea. In other words, this whole central plank of his thesis is based on a priori circular reasoning. The atheist Biblical scholar Jeffrey Gibson has engaged Doherty and his followers in online debate and came away scornfully unimpressed. He noted:

"... the plausibility of D[oherty]'s hypothesis depends on not having good knowledge of ancient philosophy, specifically Middle Platonism. Indeed, it becomes less and less plausible the more one knows of ancient philosophy and, especially, Middle Platonism.

"If you think that this is not the case, please name anyone among the actual and recognized experts in ancient philosophy and/or on Middle Platonism who thinks D's views on what the ancients thought about the way the world was constructed, and who did what where, has any merit."

The final fatal flaw in Doherty's thesis is his contrived idea that there was a "mythic Jesus Christianity" that existed alongside the better known "historical Jesus Christianity" until the latter won the battle for dominance and wiped out any reference to the former. Until Doherty came along and became the first person in about 2000 years to realise what happened.

This is completely implausible. While the idea of Machiavellian early Christians completely erasing all trace of earlier forms of Christianity may appeal to zealots and conspiracy theorists, it simply doesn't square with the evidence. It's true that later "orthodox" forms of Christianity were happy to burn the books of their "heretical" rivals to keep them from infecting the faithful. But this doesn't mean they were also happy to wipe out all trace or mention of these "heresies". On the contrary, they were keen to write long and detailed books explaining why their heretical rivals were wrong and why the orthodox view was right. They often distorted their rivals' ideas when they did this and sometimes the heresy in question had been dead for so long they were confused about precisely what the heretics in question had believed (they just knew they were wrong), but they certainly didn't erase all mention of them. They felt it was important to refute even minor or long dead heresies in as much detail as possible, just in case they rose up again (as some did occasionally).

But Doherty would have us believe that in amongst all these apologetic, anti-heretical literature there is pretty much NO reference to what should have been the biggest and most threatening heresy of all - the heresy that the historical Jesus never existed. Not only would Doherty's supposed "mythic Jesus Christianity" be a major threat to "historical Jesus Christianity" even after it had declined and vanished, it would actually have been THE major threat by merit of the fact that it was the original form of Christianity. Yet we find not a whisper about it in any of this literature. Doherty would have us believe that these writers bothered to condemn tiny and long-extinct heretical sects, yet ignored the elephant in the room and made no mention of this primary threat to their interpretation of Jesus.  

This silence makes no sense.

Unless, of course, this whole "mythic Jesus Christianity" is a figment of Doherty's speculations and didn't exist at all. Then the silence about it in the sources makes perfect sense.

So it's pretty clear why Doherty's thesis gets no traction in the academic sphere and is regarded as a flawed theory by an enthusiastic amateur. The idea that Paul didn't believe that Jesus had been a real, historical person simply doesn't work.