From: pharvey@quack.sac.ca.us (Paul Harvey)
Subject: Re: Problems with Paul's history of Jesus
Organization: The Duck Pond public unix: +1 408 249 9630, log in as 'guest'.
	<fVs9KXt@quack.sac.ca.us> <WIGGINS.92Nov20001659@hurricane.cs.odu.edu>
Date: 22 Nov 1992 19:17:40 UTC

In article <WIGGINS.92Nov20001659@hurricane.cs.odu.edu> 
wiggins@hurricane.cs.odu.edu (Samuel E Wiggins) writes:
>Unless Paul was telling the truth.  I'm not saying he does, I merely
>accede the possibility.

It's possible. Keep in mind that Paul was just a mortal human being,
although later he was "Sainted" by the RC Church. It certainly could be
true that Paul thought he was telling the truth. It could be that he
felt the history of Jesus was important enough that some embellishment
was called for. Whatever happened, Paul did rescue the history of Jesus
from an early obscurity.

>BTW, why so skeptical that he actually existed?  Hahaha.  If one believes,
>as I assume you do, that Paul's arguments are wrong, why do you also
>have to question whether he even lived?  Won't the truth eventually come
>out?

There are two people getting confused here. I am not skeptical that Paul
existed, the evidence is very convincing in his case. But Jesus is
another matter. Jesus gained very few followers in his own time and was
a flop amongst Hellenistic Jews so there is almost no historical
evidence that he even existed as an actual person. Assuming Jesus to
have existed, it was Paul who rescued his history from total obscurity.
The only question is how accurate a historian Paul was. As for the truth
eventually coming out, this isn't like a CIA scandal here. This is
almost two thousand year old history here and it is unlikely that any
evidence will be coming out that we will be able to say is clearly the
truth. Even the Romans didn't record history for the sake of truth, they
recorded it for the sake of justifying their dominance and rightful
assendancy to the throne.

>Also, supposing Paul did exist in the way presented in the NT (as we find
>him writing about himself in several places), he was fluent in both
>Greek and Aramaic, remember?  So were many of the disciples or their letter
>writers.  One could reasonably assume that a fluent speaker of two languages
>could come up with a close translation from one to the other.

No. These people used Aramaic as the everyday oral language and used
Greek as the written language or the language of the scholars. One would
have to be quite a scholar to translate accurately across language
families. The Septuagint was probably the greatest translation of its
time from Hebrew to Greek, yet we know today that even it is flawed as a
translation. Myth and religious texts are the most difficult to
translate because of all the implied subtlety that is not directly in
the literal text.

>Yeah.  Reincarnation implies new body, new physical form.  Jesus, though
>it was made complete and "glorified," kept his old physical body.  Remember
>the nail scars shown to Thomas?

The old body died so Jesus was reincarnated back into his old body.

>He didn't come back as a cow.

How do you know?

>And, reincarnation implies a progression of continuing life essence, through
>one form to another, hopefully getting better and eventually achieving
>oneness in bliss with the transcendent, etc. etc.  Jesus as God existed with
>God the Father since the beginning (already at one, so to speak), and divested 
>Himself of bliss for awhile (not because He did anything wrong).  He gave up
>what reincarnation strives for, which is unheard of in that philosophy.

"and divested Himself of bliss for awhile" For what? Did he hope to get
better and eventually acheive oneness again with the transcendent, etc,
etc? And what does reincarnation strive for? And I hope you are aware
that the Buddha achieved enlightenment, oneness with the transcendent,
yet Buddha came back to play with the children just as Jesus did. It is
said that Buddha is so good at playing the role of human being that we
less enlightened would never recognize the Buddha in person. Buddha
could be any of the homeless on the street or Sister Theresa or ...
Xref: sparky talk.religion.misc:21614 sci.skeptic:19941 alt.censorship:8943 alt.sex:36922