JESUS WAS AN APPARITION NOT A MAN

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DID CORINTHIANS TEACH CHRIST DEATH MYTH?

PAUL SAYS AUTHORITY NOT VISIONS OR EVIDENCE COUNTS

PAUL SAYS THERE IS ONLY VISIONARY EVIDENCE FOR JESUS

There were many who in the early days of the Church did not believe that there was a man called Jesus who died recently at least in the sense that people knew him before he died and seen his death. Most of them thought he was just an apparition not a man. It is thought that these people, the Docetists, give no evidence that Jesus never lived. It is thought that they didn't deny that, but just denied that Jesus was a real man.

Yet scholars say that the gospellers came along and tried to turn Jesus into a real flesh and blood historical figure. They had to present the risen Jesus as saying that he was no ghost for he could eat. But if Jesus was an illusion or a vision, his being able to eat would prove nothing. A vision could appear to eat though it was not actually eating.

By saying that Jesus was a vision and used tricks to appear like a man, the Docetists were denying the reliability of the evidence for Jesus. To deny the reliability of evidence for Jesus as a man is only a short step from denying the reliability of the evidence of the existence of Jesus.

And if the Docetists thought that the apostles could see Jesus but nobody else could that would be strong evidence that Jesus never existed.

The top early Christian and first Christian writer, St Paul, wrote two epistles to the Church in Corinth to contend with believers who denied the resurrection of the body and Jesus’ resurrection by implication. He was converted soon after the alleged resurrection of Jesus but even he gives clues that Jesus was an apparition. He says nothing about Jesus that is incompatible with this interpretation and makes statements that prove that despite his belief that Jesus was a man he had no evidence for it only visions. But he knew they weren’t great evidence either for he told the Corinthians that Jesus must have risen for the dead will be lost forever if he hasn’t which is obvious nonsense and desperation. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if Jesus wasn’t the saviour for somebody else could be the real saviour and maybe God could save the dead without him. The first generation of Christians as evidenced by Paul, gave us much evidence that Jesus was not a man but a vision. Their evidence precedes the gospels in time so it is what we should listen to in preference to the gospels.

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DID CORINTHIANS TEACH CHRIST DEATH MYTH?

Paul in 1 Corinthians said that he had a right to marry as did the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Peter (9:5). He didn't say he had a right to marry because Jesus had done it. An anti erotic tendency was in the Church from the start and even influenced official Church teaching. These considerations lead believers to hold that Jesus Christ was not married. But the gospels speak of Jesus being alone with loose women and allowing and protecting marriage. They don't mention Jesus being married but a man of his age would have had to have been married. People would not take to an unmarried man any more than they would a homosexual for marriage was considered to be of extreme importance.

So Jesus had to have been married if the gospels are even basically true in what they say about him. But he wasn't when we consider the reasons against his being a married man. The only solution is that Jesus was really so obscure nobody knew if he had a wife or not or he was only known when he started appearing to people claiming to be a resurrected being.

Later in the letter Paul defends the reality of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead to save us. It may be that the heretics Paul was battling against with 1 Corinthians 15 thought the resurrection of Jesus was an illusion and not real. Just as you use parables to make points so God might use visionary parables like resurrections to try and get a point across for the human mind can’t understand what he is trying to say. They explain that it is so easy to make a mistake and end up with the wrong interpretation.

Some think that what they believed was that the resurrection was not real in the earthly sense of a man dying and rising again bodily. They could have thought of it as a symbol from Heaven for mystics believed that God was so different from what we are used to he has to use symbolic pictures and parables that may take years for us to crack for divine truth is hard if not nearly impossible for mortals to grasp. They thought the death and resurrection of Christ were mystical events. They would say that the apostles think now they had experiences with a resurrected man but this is a primitive attitude and a shadow of the truth that God was trying to get across to them. Many of them would have believed that the apostles did not grasp the secret knowledge in their visions. If the resurrection of Christ was an attempt to give spiritual insight through symbolism and pictures then so was the death of Jesus. The New Testament mentions heretics who believed the resurrection of all the dead had already happened meaning the resurrection just a metaphor for receiving some mystical enlightenment.

An argument like that could not be answered by Paul at all except to argue that terrible things would happen if Jesus has not really risen in the way Paul meant and Jesus said he would rise. The objection to this argument is that their objection to the resurrection would have no value for they are interpreting the apostles’ experience while it is up to the apostles to interpret their own experience. They were the ones that had the experience after all.

But the heretics would have believed that they themselves got the light from God to crack the code and understand so this objection collapses. The evidence from Paul’s reaction to the heretics is that they did not take the death and resurrection of Jesus literally as an event like the birth of Augustus Caesar but as a spiritual or mystical event. They were like the Christians in other places who according to the New Testament were saying that the resurrection had already taken place. They were saying that the resurrection in which the dead come back to life was only a metaphor for some mystical experience that changes your life that makes a whole new person in such a sense that your life starts with that experience.

Some think the heretics were not saying that Jesus was dead but that he survived death naturally and so he did not rise from the dead. This is not true because of the way Paul talks. He would have tried to prove Jesus died if they had been saying that. The heretics did not believe in any historical happening that could possibly be interpreted as a resurrection.

If the death and resurrection of Jesus had been recent events, there had to have been heretics in Corinth who did not call the apostles liars, unlike the ones Paul took to task for calling them that, but who said Jesus swooned and came around and was thought to have risen from the dead when he met up with his friends later. Logic says that it would have been better to challenge them for they would have been easier to revert to Christianity if the historical evidence contradicted them. But Paul did not do that, meaning that his Jesus lived too long ago. All he could do was forget about them or what is more likely these heretics did not exist. If they did not exist then the only basis for believing in Jesus was the visions of the apostles. You don’t say a man must have swooned and came around again over visions that might be lies or hallucinations when the man died and rose a long time ago before he appeared in the latter days. You could if the man died recently.

It is interesting that Paul says that he and the apostles are lying if Jesus did not rise. Why didn’t he say the apostles would be or mistaken or possessed by the deluding power of Satan if they were wrong? But he just said lying. Psychologically speaking then, they really were lying. If Jesus didn’t rise bodily at all and it was entirely spiritual, they could have seen a ghost claiming to be a resurrected being for all we know. If there was no resurrection and merely apparitions, then obviously a fictitious resurrection for Jesus would not make liars of the apostles.

Many of the heretics would have said that the apostles misinterpreted the experience they had.

If there had been an inexplicably empty tomb, the apostles could have thought Jesus rose and if they had no authentic visions but hallucinations or were too dumb to understand what was happening, they could be mistaken but not liars if they said he rose. The apostles wanted to be called liars and nothing else if the resurrection never happened. The willingness then to accept the liar appellation implies that the apostles were claiming to know they were perfectly sane and not deluded by Satan or any other ability. It implies that they said they knew spiritually their experience of the Jesus visions was from God and real. It means they put more value on their religious feelings than on the visions themselves! This is just typical of what religious people do. They pretend to themselves that because they feel their gospel is true that it is true! Why should we believe the apostles’ feelings and not the feelings of those who felt in their hearts that Jesus did not come back from the dead? The fact that their assertions boil down to that is enough to expose them as liars. It could be that by accepting the tag “liars” if the resurrection of Jesus never happened that they are saying they are admitting they would be lying. In fact, this is an admission of lying for how else could they be so sure?

When a man says that what he and his friends say is not a lie when he should add that it is not a mistake either it is a dead giveaway that he and they are liars and he knows it. And it is an even bigger dead giveaway when he cannot rebut the sceptics adequately which happens all the time when sceptics uncover outrageous lies. This consideration tells us that the heretics knew what they were talking about unlike Paul and Co. It tells us to rely on them and not Paul and the apostles.

The resurrection could still have happened if Paul and the apostles were lying – it would just mean we have no reason or right to believe in it for we have no evidence. So when Paul says it could not if they lie he is saying that the other witnesses like the 500 plus who allegedly saw the risen Jesus are untrustworthy. Or maybe some forger inserted the bit where he mentions them.

When Paul suggests that it is unthinkable that he and the rest could be lying, what he is hinting is that if Jesus rose fully bodily from the tomb and used the body that was nailed to the cross in its entirety that the disappearance of the body and not by theft but by divine power could be verified satisfactorily because the resurrection is dependant not on an empty grave but on the apostles’ word. The arrogance is breathtaking. The resurrection witnesses were undoubtedly motivated by pride to tell their story which means we have to be wary because they were more worried about their own religious gratification and not at all about the truth.

Paul says that the Corinthian heresy that the resurrection never happened accuses the apostles of being liars. The heretics are sure that the apostles did not make an honest mistake but were liars. To lie is to knowingly say what is not true. We must ask then if they are liars then are the heretics saying they never had visions at all? Not necessarily. The heretics could be suggesting that the apostles are deliberately perverting their experience to justify a false doctrine of a literal historical resurrection and a physical literal Jesus.

Did the heretics think Jesus never rose and nothing odd happened after his death full stop? The way Paul talks to them is as if they are not openly denying Christ rose but re-interpreting what it means to say that Jesus rose from the dead. This interpretation had to be in some mystical sense. Also they were indicating this by implication by denying the bodily resurrection that awaits humanity for he told them that if Jesus is preached to them as having been raised he cannot see how they can maintain that there is no resurrection for others. The Christian suggestion that if they thought nothing odd happened after Jesus’ death, then Paul would have verified why the apostles’ testimony was true is wrong. It wrongly assumes he could verify and it is obvious from the passage that he could not and had to clutch insanely at straws. He just said that there would be terrible consequences if the doctrine were false which suggests that the apostles were going around telling people to believe Jesus rose just because they said so. When Paul said that the apostles would be lying if there were no resurrection he was clearly indicating that the heretics were not saying the resurrection of Christ never happened for then the apostles could just have been wrong and not been liars.

If the heretics were misinterpreting the resurrection as a mystical event and holding that there would be no physical resurrection then Paul would have clearly corrected this if he could. He would have stated that he and the apostles touched a real body and the risen Jesus said he was real but he couldn’t for there was no such evidence and none of the apostles were saying there was – if it was that bad for a risen Jesus then what was it like for a historical Jesus? The critics did not believe anybody who said that the risen Jesus was a man and that was what Paul was trying to get them to believe and he was trying to do it without relevant evidence for there was none and he was afraid to contradict the other apostles and invent some. The gospel story that Jesus had been eating after his resurrection and letting women feel him was obviously not concocted yet. This story would have been verified and promoted by Paul in order to convince the heretics if he had heard of it even if the heretics were just denying the resurrection full stop for touch and sight are often better than sight alone.

Perhaps Paul believed that this dying and rising Jesus was a pantheistic dying and rising entity that was one person with the Church. He does say that the Church is the body of Christ, parts of Christ, and he certainly means it more than as a symbol for he raves on about it. Perhaps the heretics were saying then that the resurrection wasn’t real but was a symbol. They could have been believing the same thing all along but just misunderstanding. It is like a priest who believes the bread and wine at communion are the body and blood of Christ and who keeps calling them symbols. He could be misunderstood by somebody who doesn’t realise that in Catholic teaching that the bread and wine are literally changed but are symbols at the same time.

It is a possibility that since Paul said such strange things to defend the resurrection such as that we are inevitably lost if Jesus has not risen is that the resurrection was not a historical event but a mystical one. Paul and his heretics could have been saying the same thing and misunderstood one another. Paul could have been a Gnostic, a person who sees the resurrection as a mystical enlightenment that gives knowledge of salvation, for he was undoubtedly a mystic. He could have believed that the visions of Jesus and the resurrection were just symbols from God to give a glimpse of something so abstruse and paradoxical that it could not be put into words. The resurrection in this view would mean a change in our status with God and his accepting us out of spiritual death. That alone would explain why Jesus not rising would be such a disaster. Had it been a historical event that never happened there would still be the room for hope that another would save us by his resurrection. But the resurrection is really about God changing the status of Jesus who is raised from some kind of mystical death to a mystical resurrection so that Jesus can save us for he is the Son of God. We and Jesus are connected so that we rise with him after dying with him (Romans 6). In some sense, we are one person with this Jesus. That is why it has to be him and nobody else for nobody else is us. Silly yes but a lot of ancients thought that way.

There is no doubt that whatever the truth is that what Paul wrote on this subject indicates that Jesus Christ left no evidence of his death and therefore of his human life. Paul said that God cursed anybody hanged on a tree and Jesus became a curse for he was crucified. For God to raise Jesus from the dead would be accusing God of raising a cursed being from the dead to make him second in charge. The suggestion would be nothing short of blasphemous to the Jews yet they never found it offensive and the bickering in the early Church for the first few decades was all over circumcision. Only if the crucifixion was a mystical and non-literal event and so was the resurrection could hostile attention be avoided. The crucifixion and resurrection described something very mystical and strange and otherworldly. The concept of God is strange so why not? It is certain that the claim of some that if Christianity had been invented the crucified saviour would not have been invented for it was too offensive is itself disproven by the Bible one way or another.

In this view, the difference between Paul and the heretics was an imagined one. They did not realise that they were on the one wavelength because they expressed themselves differently and misunderstood one another. I think Paul did not believe that Jesus died and rose on this earth but died and rose in another and that this was physical in some sense. But the death and resurrection of Jesus could have been in his Church for he was a pantheistic deity.

Paul argued that the pagans knew the dead rise for they are baptised for the dead (v29). The pagans believed that if they got baptised by proxy for the dead the dead could be saved in the resurrection. He argues from this that the resurrection of the dead must be a reality! But what did the pagans know? Do pagans praying to many gods mean that there is more than one God? The desperation of Paul who knew the resurrection was sinking into the sand is unmistakeable.

When Paul said there that sceptical Christians should believe in the resurrection because some pagans are baptised for the dead he made it clear that there was no evidence for Jesus’ resurrection when he had to use that argument. If we should take the pagans who are baptised for the dead as evidence that there was a resurrection for Jesus then we should take it as evidence for the death of Jesus as well. Baptism pictured death and burial and resurrection (Romans 6). Now what Paul must mean is that the pagans sense that a mystical death and resurrection is necessary. That means that Jesus died and rose mystically but not in the sense of an earthly man dying and rising again. The metaphysics of it are incomprehensible.

Paul answered the heretics who were saying that the dead don’t rise for there is a problem with what kind of body they will have (v35). He calls them fools here not for asking a question but for seeing a problem in this. The heretics were obviously troubled by how a rotted body could rise again for clearly God could find it easy to restore a fresh corpse to life. He had to explain to them that the risen body is different from the body that dies in many ways though the old body provides the seed for it so they were wrong to think that the entire physical constitution would be renovated by God and he reminded them too that Adam was made from dust so the resurrection body could be made from an entire rotted body.

So he has two explanations. One, The resurrection body is not like an ordinary body so it is easy to believe it can come from an ordinary body. Two, Adam was made from dust.

One tells us that the body of Jesus didn’t need or involve the revival of a corpse. The less of the corpse used in the resurrection body the easier it would be to believe in the resurrection.

Two tells us that these people, these heretics were indeed professing Christians for they were reminded that Adam was made from dust. This was the account given in the Old Testament. So they were reminded in effect that they believed in the Old Testament and therefore had to believe that Adam was made from dust meaning resurrection from the dead is possible.

Bringing the two ideas together we see that the new body is made from part of the old.

His explanations prove then that they disputed the resurrection because bodies decayed and when Jesus’ resurrection was rejected as well that tells us that they believed that Jesus must have decayed too and lived centuries before he began to appear as a resurrected being. The heretics would have believed that bodies were too bad to be raised up which was why Paul stressed that they were right and the body has to be changed before God can admit a risen person into Heaven. Gnostics believed that the body was evil for it weakened the person and was subject to decay. Nobody believed in the existence of the Jesus we find in the gospels at all in those days. We are even given a clue in this that they did not believe the apostle when he wrote that Jesus died and rose three days later. The three days reference could be an interpolation. He doesn’t strive to defend it as if he didn’t care about history or the three days was something that there was no evidence for.

When an expert on religion cannot adequately answer those who say the death and resurrection of Jesus does not describe earthly events it is clear who has won the argument. Them! And even more so when the expert himself is confused about their doctrine and may agree with them unknowingly!

When Paul suggests that we must believe in the resurrection because of the witnesses of the visions of Jesus after the resurrection with the evidence of the empty tomb being ignored as if it was not true or known or relevant or whatever it most probably means it was not known for Jesus was buried too long ago.

If Jesus was made up then why did nobody say that his resurrection was seen just as it happened? A possible answer is that they saw no need. Seeing Jesus after the resurrection is as good as seeing him rise. A possible answer is that the early story did not teach that there was an empty tomb. When the body was in the tomb it was only a matter of Jesus appearing to prove his resurrection. If there had been a resurrection there would have been some people who said they saw it happen if not by being actually there then by some kind of vision in which they were able to indulge in a bit of remote viewing. Alleged events like that attract loads of crackpots. But it seems such people did not exist. Those who believe that there was an empty tomb might say the gospellers dared not say that anybody seen the resurrection happening for that would mean somebody was present at the tomb that could have taken the body. They were not interested in proving the body was not stolen but they were interested in proving that Jesus appeared. Another answer is that Jesus was believed to have risen centuries before.

Nobody that writes IF it is certain that one man’s (Adam’s) fall condemned all to death then it is even more certain that Jesus will cause all men to become righteous and live forever (Romans 5) unless this fall and the salvation won by Jesus are both in the same evidential category – ie that both are ifs. He does not mean the certainty that comes from evidence, or the certainty that comes from experience, for being sinful doesn’t mean one man in the past is to blame for your sins as much as you are or experiencing forgiveness does not necessarily mean that Jesus earned it for you when he did the opposite of what Adam did. But yet he is trying to use Adam to show that there had to be a Jesus to reverse what Adam did. He is referring to emotional certainty; you feel these things happened so they happened! To appeal to feelings as evidence indicates that there is nothing else to depend on. The Jesus of the gospels never lived. Suppose there is no direct evidence for the existence of John F Kennedy. You don’t argue that if the United States had to have a Catholic President eventually that President John F Kennedy must have existed. If you do that shows there is no direct evidence. The non-existence of evidence for Jesus that would stand up scientifically or in a court of law is all over the epistles of Paul.

So Paul thinks that it is more certain that Jesus saved than that Adam fell for we feel that more strongly. That is bizarre because you would need to believe Adam fell as much as you believed that Jesus reversed it. The two beliefs cannot be even partly separated. But what it tells us is this. It is because people would rather believe they are saved and feel it stronger than they do that they have fallen the former is the best authenticated belief! The epistemology of the first Christians was horrendous.

Clearly the 15^th Chapter of Corinthians, shows that a historical Jesus didn’t exist in the minds of Paul or his converts and his heretics never mind in the first century!

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VISIONS AND THE EXISTENCE OF JESUS

When all is said and done, all the New Testament has to offer as evidence for Jesus is visions for what the gospels offer is not even fit to be called evidence. Lots of people have visions that aren’t real so why should we heed the ones that led to the Jesus legend?

The historical material of the gospels is really just myth. The earliest Christian writings came from a man who depended entirely on visions implying there was no history for Jesus. He had to combat heresy and the best way to do that was to speak of what Jesus did and taught instead of appealing to apparitions so he did not use the best way for it was not an option. When he spoke of others seeing Jesus he did not say what they saw or how they saw it. It could have been a strange light in the shape of a man or he could have been seen in dreams.

That this writer, who was of course St Paul, depended on visions only is clear from his 2 Corinthians 11 and 12. Chapter 11:6 says that Paul knows Christianity and its basis thoroughly so he can refute the false Jesuses of the heretics and show that his is the true one. And then he does it by accusing the heretics of making money out of religion and by reminding Corinth about how much he suffered for his Christ! This obviously proves he could not use history to do it. He was annoyed that he had to use his life and suffering and visions as evidence for he despised boasting (11:1; 12:1,6). Paul was desperate to counteract the revelations of the false apostles and it was an urgent situation and yet he never once used the Jesus story to do it. The two chapters prove that Jesus was just a hallucination or vision beyond any doubt.

Ephesians 3 has Paul saying that the mystery of Jesus was made known to him by direct revelation and was hidden from the people of the past but is now revealed by the Holy Spirit to him and the apostles. The context is about the Church being the dwelling place of God purified by the atonement of Jesus so that must be the mystery (Ephesians 2:20-3:1). Most think it is the mystery of God accepting Jew and Gentile alike. But that was not a mystery that was only demystified by the apostles. Isaiah 56 explicitly says that God will accept Jews and Gentiles as believers and as his people. And how could God accepting differing races be a mystery? Accepting one is what I would call a mystery because of the potential for racism. The saved Church mystery is closer in context. So that is the one that is meant. The mystery is Jew and Gentile being the dwelling of God and his Church. So the mystery is not about who is involved but what happens when they get involved - they become a supernatural entity, a Church, filled with the Holy Spirit. Ephesians refutes the gospel Jesus who has the Church of the Holy Spirit created and preached about even before his death. It even says the mystery is being revealed now through the apostles and when the Luke account says it was not revealed this way or but long before this now the gospellers are being proven to have fibbed quite a bit. If Jesus did not preach the gospel of grace which was so basic until after his death then it follows that the historical Jesus was an unknown person at best or a person who never really existed or that people imagined visions and this led to belief in a man called Jesus.

The liberal Christian belief that the gospels and early Christian teachings were worked out by visions and revelations and the reflections of the Church long after Jesus is certainly correct. They look at many of the parables of Jesus in the Bible and they say that they are what the later Church said rather than what Jesus really said. Here in an epistle, the apostles get the most basic revelation of them all long after the resurrection visions. The most basic one is that God lives in his Church and guides it and it took them decades to discover it! Jesus did not found any Church in the Christian sense at all. The resurrection of Jesus means nothing unless the Holy Spirit is in the witnesses and they form his Church. The resurrection is supposed to be based on the word of God not the word of man. Man needs to have the Holy Spirit so that his word is the word of the Spirit and not his own creation. Christianity claims to follow God not men and that is its most basic outlook.

Back to Ephesians. If Paul was saying that the mystery was the acceptance of Jew and Gentile then clearly Jesus had never approached non-Jews and had never commanded the apostles to take the gospel to every nation. Yet the gospels contradict him on this. Who is lying then? Clearly it would be the gospels. Paul speaks then as if he was the first to see that the Gentiles should be converted. Then Jesus did not found a Catholic Church, that is a Church for all nations, for if he had then that would have been clear from the beginning. If he founded a Church it was not Catholic. So whether the mystery was that gentiles were welcome in the Church or that the Church was supernatural or both then clearly the Church was not Catholic.

The Second Letter of Peter recounts the transfiguration of Jesus and the writer says he witnessed it and heard God saying Jesus was his son. Yet he said that the word of the Old Testament was even more sure than this! He had reason to believe that he had had an illusion albeit a possibly divinely inspired illusion. When what he hinted was a doubtful miracle was all he could present as evidence for Jesus it shows that there was nothing. And this coming from a tradition of Peter the rock Jesus supposedly built his Church on! When he thinks the Old Testament is the sole source of reliable truth he is against the production of any gospels and stresses that we must listen to this word of God until the new dawn of resurrection morn comes (2 Peter 1:19). The early Church thought that post-resurrection visions and the empty tomb of Jesus were not important reasons to believe in Jesus compared to the Old Testament saying Jesus would rise from the dead. Second Peter thought so little of empty tombs and rising bodies that he eliminated the evidence for a physical resurrection.

Second Peter states that the apostles did not give out cleverly devised myths when they revealed to the world the power and the coming of the Lord Jesus but were eyewitnesses to a visionary event, the transfiguration, that revealed the majesty of Jesus (1:16). In other words, a vision verified the power and coming of Jesus. It doesn't hint that it means the second coming of Christ. It just says coming. The vision he recounts said nothing or indicated nothing about a second coming. Second Peter is plainly saying that Jesus' power and coming had to be revealed to the apostles in a vision. He was not heard of before. This supports the idea that there was no Jesus known of until some people claimed to be having visions of this being who claimed to have been crucified and died and rose again.

The early Church thought it had the miracle power to speak in unknown languages and prophecy. Paul stated in 1 Corinthians 14 that the gift of tongues is for converting those who do not accept Christianity as true and that the gift of prophecy is for those who are already Christians. Yet he admitted this tongues miracle was not very good for unbelievers would think that people doing it were off their heads. When you have to use nearly useless miracles to get converts that is a sign of desperation. It is also a sign that the early Church with its apostles, who were the witnesses of Jesus, was indeed mad. Paul declared that prophecy, reading the hearts of unbelievers, was a sign as well. But it was not much of a sign for it was meant only for the believers. Fortune tellers found it easy to make up stuff and be very accurate in those days for life was less complicated then than now and even now they can still do well! The prophecy sign is not impressive either. Paul would have known that too so his using it is another sign of desperation for evidence.

Paul even denied that Jesus did miracles for if the earthly Jesus he had no interest in had done them, Paul would not have used the charisms like speaking in tongues and the other madcap activities of the Church as evidence of any kind or value. He would have used the miracles of Jesus as far superior proofs. He could do no better when he used such bad proofs as charisms. Paul stated in Romans 5 that by faith in Jesus we are made righteous and we can boast that we look forward to God’s glory and that this hope is not deceptive for God puts love in our hearts by the Holy Spirit. In other words, just because you live a better life and believe these things it means that God is approving of your belief. For this reasoning to be valid, Paul would need to accuse any religion that claimed to do the same of lying. A man who depends on arrogance and hate-mongering to get converts is a man who cannot get any evidence for what he wants people to believe. His view is no better than the Mormon sects who believe that God tells them that he is an exalted man and that he is Adam himself by giving them a feeling.

Paul’s experience was completely based on visions. He was the earliest writer and the early bird is the important one. He supersedes the gospels no matter if they are plausible or not. He made his Church dependent on dubious miracles like speaking in tongues which infers that Jesus did no miracles. He said that Jesus rose from the dead for if he didn’t then the dead are lost forever and the faith is useless. This stupid argument implies that he could think of nothing better so his account that outlines Jesus’ appearance to the apostles must be an interpolation or was not much use. The empty tomb was not mentioned. Paul had to deal with a Church that had started to doubt the resurrection of any kind of body physical or more ghostly and would have done better than that if he could. Paul’s hallucinations or his claim to have visions (which might have been a lie) started off belief in Jesus and led to the formation of the Christian Church. When he could not prove that Jesus rose from the dead and stressed this heavenly risen Jesus then is it likely that there was a Jesus at all? Of course not!

If there was better evidence for Jesus it is lost now and we have no reason to think it ever existed. It is not surprising if some authorities assumed that there was a historical Jesus. We know how gossip gets more unreliable by the minute.

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PAUL SAYS AUTHORITY NOT VISIONS OR EVIDENCE COUNTS

Paul was no use as a witness for his extreme arrogance and bias was evident when he declared in Galatians that even if he himself changed his gospel, gospel means good news, and even if an angel from Heaven came with any different doctrine that both should be held to be accursed and unworthy of being listened to. Galatians 1:8, 9: “But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to and different from that which we preached to you, let him be accursed (anathema, devoted to destruction, doomed to eternal punishment). As we said before, so I now say again, If anyone is preaching to you a gospel different from or contrary to that which you received from us, let him be accursed” Amplified Bible. In other words, nobody’s visions were any good unless they supported what he was saying. Christians say he was being hypothetical but people would have seen visions of angels contradicting Paul for he complained about rivals having visions so that is out. He was saying that even if God sent an angel to contradict Paul, God should be ignored. This is clear evidence of insanity and dishonesty. The fact that Paul admitted that his gospel is full of mystery, seeming contradictions, makes the whole thing worse for it puts a curse on anybody who has visions in aid of a more coherent looking gospel. He condemns rival gospels, remember these are gospels, they offer a message of hope and comfort so Paul was condemning all religious consolation and comfort that didn’t fit his vision of what a gospel should be. If a gospel failed to offer hope it would get no followers.

Paul wrote that some were going over from his gospel to a different and even an opposed gospel (Galatians 1:6) but there can’t be any other gospel (1:7) and they are distorting the gospel of Christ (1:7). So what many of them were doing was just disagreeing with parts of the gospel. He says his gospel is the gospel of Christ. This letter opposes any attempt to undermine the idea that salvation is by faith alone without good works. This is what it means primarily by the gospel of Christ. But the gospel Jesus never taught that doctrine so he is another Jesus from that of the early Church. Paul is dogmatic on this point, deny that Jesus has done it all and say he has done most of it or nearly all of it so you need to do some good works to be saved and what you have is not a gospel. Then any alteration means a gospel is not good news though it says it is, it leads to eternal damnation. This epistle proves that Protestants who believe Paul’s gospel cannot consort with the Roman Catholic Church which adds good works and sacraments to faith as a condition of salvation. Get it wrong on justification you end up unsaved and damned which is why he tolerates no dissent at all.

He said anybody who teaches anything different from his gospel is to be condemned, he did not say those who were doing the misleading which would leave room for having pity instead of wrath towards the preacher who was misled but not willingly misleading people. The Vatican II Catholicism which teaches this distinction then is heretical and is the basis for its dropping the appellation heretics for modern Protestants. Paul’s bigotry is a sign of being on unsure ground, he acted sure but he wasn’t but whatever was going to happen he was going to focus on acquiring power for himself and rank as the best apostle of Jesus. He was going to scare people into agreeing with his gospel because there was no evidence to help. There was no real Jesus who did real miracles and all he had was an apparition that claimed to be of a man who died on a cross for sins and rose again.

Paul and his preachers had been saying that even an angel altering the gospel should be accursed for a long time for he says “We” and they must have been saying the same thing themselves when he was so sure they were with him on this one. That means he knew what people would think of it, he knew how nasty and arrogant and bigoted it sounded for he would have been told often enough. Paul and his evangelists were evil men who practiced a form of religion but inwardly denied its power the thing they accused their rivals of doing. Paul said the Galatians were told it before so his Church made a point of declaring that even God himself should be ignored if he taught anything that didn’t fit the gospel. He was saying that no matter what evidence you got that the gospel was wrong you should ignore it. He says later on that this gospel is the one taught by the Jerusalem apostles as well. So they all agreed then that evidence didn’t matter, but agreeing with their interpretation did. Is this the kind of cooking pot you would see a true gospel story of Jesus’ life incubating in? Could the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John be anything other than clever lies when a Church like that wrote them? Could any of the witnesses of the risen Jesus really be relied on when evidence meant nothing to them but believing a message just because they wanted to believe it did? The early Church was a hotbed of authoritarianism by the apostles and fanaticism in the converts. The gospel Jesus however says that man was not made for the Sabbath and that leaders should really be slaves and what has the Jesus of Paul’s Church in common with this one? One of them is a fabrication if not both.

Whatever the truth is, the Church and Paul put the focus on apostolic authority, not on evidence and not on visions. In other words, they wanted people to believe in Jesus NOT because they saw him but because they said he rose and had the authority from him to say it. This is totally irrational, manipulative and dishonest. Their game was to climb the ladder and be above other people. Authority not revelation is the real focus with revelation just being a decoy and a bait to get this authority respected. To believe in their visions is simply blasphemy.

“Now to Him Who is able to strengthen you in the faith which is in accordance with my Gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ according to the revelation (the unveiling) of the mystery of the plan of redemption which was kept in silence and secret for long ages, But is now disclosed and through the prophetic Scriptures is made known to all nations, according to the command of the eternal God, [to win them] to obedience to the faith” (Romans 16:25,26). Amplified Bible.

Notice that Paul wants them to strengthen their faith by going to the Old Testament prophecies. This then was considered the best way to see the evidence not listening to accounts of apparitions of Jesus or looking for miracles he did or even pondering Jesus’ teaching. This is irreconcilable with the gospel portrait of a Jesus who wants to be known by himself. It is irreconcilable with the idea of a Jesus who lived recently and who was known as a man. It also shows that if it could be proved that the prophecies didn’t say those things then the apostles thought it right to say they were deluded in their apparitions. It is important to know as well that it was hard for the people he was writing to, for them to research the scriptures. Checking out Jesus through investigators would have been tons easier. When an experienced teacher like Paul still directs them to do what is so hard when there should be easier ways if Jesus really did what the gospels said he did it is clear that it was the only way.

Also he speaks of the mystery of redemption as a secret. Something you don’t tell is not necessarily a secret. A secret is what you work at keeping hidden. Paul means it was kept hidden. Also Jesus didn’t redeem till he was crucified and raised. So you may say the redemption wasn’t finished until he rose again. It’s not much of a redemption from sin and death that just wipes the slate clean which is why Paul wrote that Jesus rose again for us to make us holy just as he died for us to make us clean (Romans 6:8;7:4;5:10). God kept the secret until the redemption for when people were saved and had their sins taken away they had light from God. Paul speaks of this light in several places. Not only does it incline believers who are truly converted to do good but to see it and understand God and God’s scriptures for the Holy Spirit dwells in them. The secret then was not revealed during the life of Christ but at his resurrection appearances. Some converted then and got the Holy Spirit and began to see Jesus in the Old Testament and see what must have happened to him.

Paul said that the mystery of how Christ redeemed us was never known before but was revealed by divine command through the prophecies of scripture in Paul’s time. The Christians always claimed that Jesus and how he saved us by his cross and resurrection were predicted by the Old Testament writings. They say that Paul doesn’t say that Jesus and the plan were revealed only through the prophecies. But it is possible he meant that all the same. Paul said that it was his gospel that was revealed through these writings and predictions ending the silence and the secrecy of the plan. So the plan was not revealed by apparitions of Jesus or by Jesus himself for that would mean they showed what the plan was not the scriptures. Remember the plan was showed by the scriptures. What Jesus did was prove and reveal what the scriptures meant so that the plan became plainly seen from the scriptures.

The alleged resurrection apparitions may have helped people see the plan in scripture but what is important is what scripture says. This seems to be telling us that the foundation of the religion was what the religion thought it read in scripture not apparitions or a Jesus. If Jesus was known as a man Paul would not have written this way. If Jesus was known only as an apparition that needed to be checked out by scripture that would be different. But the picture we get from all this is that the existence of Jesus and his death and resurrection were worked out from scripture FIRST and then the apparitions took place not as evidence but as confirmation or a complement to scripture.

The purpose of the visions was to draw attention not to themselves but to the scriptures. They had the same role as private revelations have in Roman Catholicism. For example, if Jesus appears today he is not giving new revelation but simply helping the Church focus on revelation already given.

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PAUL SAYS THERE IS ONLY VISIONARY EVIDENCE FOR JESUS

Paul in Romans 10 says that the righteousness of the Law of Moses comes from works (he said works not earnings which means he rejects the Roman Catholic doctrine that he was not denying salvation by works but salvation by attempts to earn salvation – Paul had to be clear for his letters were given to be read to the congregations and it is hard enough to get people to follow long readings at the best of times) while the righteousness of faith does not. Then he says that the righteousness of faith forbids us to ask who will ascend to Heaven for that is to bring Christ down to earth again. And forbids us to say who will descend under the earth for that would be to demand that Jesus rise again from the dead. What is sought is the word of God, God’s truth. Paul concludes that the word rather is in the heart of the believer because of the preachers of the gospel putting it there so there is no need to look to go to Heaven or to under the earth to get it.

This is a very strange chapter. Whatever can it mean?

Let us break it up.

He said that if we could get faith and the truth in Heaven and could go there we would be bringing Jesus Christ down to earth again.

Why would Christ have to come back to earth if we could go to Heaven to find the word? It must be to teach but why would he need to if we get the word there? Plainly then God will not give the word of God without Christ and will send Christ back to earth before he lets anybody go to Heaven to find the truth. Paul is being hypothetical. He doesn’t think anybody can actually do that.

He said that if we could get the word of God in the underworld and look there we would be making Christ rise up from the dead anew.

Again Paul is being hypothetical.

Why would looking for the word in the underworld make Christ rise up again from the dead? How could he rise more than once? God will raise Christ from the dead again before he lets anybody go to the abyss to find the truth if that is where it is. But why should Jesus have to rise again? If he rose once how can he be raised once more? Why doesn’t Paul say Jesus will be made to appear again before anybody would be allowed to get the truth in the abyss? Why can’t God send an angel if there is a difficulty? He says only Jesus risen can give us the truth. Jesus has to rise not just appear.

The answer is that if Jesus hasn’t brought us truth so that we need to get it ourselves then Jesus is dead and needs to rise again after meeting God so he can tell us what God revealed. There is hyperbole in this: you can’t get God’s truth in Heaven or in the abyss unless God gives you the power to so Paul is saying that even if God does that we should decline and go to Jesus. Its exaggeration to make a point, don’t accept truth even from God if he wants to give it to you, go to Jesus and only the resurrected Jesus. And the point is that nothing should make up our minds for us but Jesus and the word he brought. Obviously it is no good if somebody else has the truth from Jesus and you go to them. You have to go to Jesus himself – he has to appear to you and tell you. Listening to somebody telling you what Jesus told them is as bad as not going directly to Jesus for many misinterpret and lie about his teaching.

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Clearly, nobody can be trusted to teach the word accurately without having visions of the Lord Jesus as a resurrected being. They need to be guided by visions all the time. This is a clear denial of the value of focusing on the earthly life of Jesus. Even Jesus has no authority unless he has risen from the dead. Paul’s Jesus didn’t do miracles in his pre-resurrection life. Paul’s preachers can only be trusted if they repeat parrot fashion what he hears in his visions and get confirmation from Jesus in visions that its all accurate. If Jesus had an earthly life only what he says about it in visions counts now. This attitude condemns gospels as heretical for you need the living prophet, not books and also implies that the second coming of Jesus and the resurrection of the dead and judgement would have to take place before the apostles die if Christianity is true. These events would be necessary to prevent pollution of the faith. We know the early Church did teach that all these happenings were to be expected any day back then.

Paul would then have dismissed the gospels as heretical nonsense or dubious at best. Their authors didn’t claim to be guided by apparitions. Paul’s Christianity is totally antithetical to the four gospels we have. The earliest Christian authorities didn’t approve of attempts to make gospels and the gospels are lies and cannot be contemplated as evidence for a historical Jesus.

If Jesus as a man taught us by his life and example and miracles and teachings none of what Paul wrote in the chapter would make any sense.

Because Jesus came back from the dead and went to God, he knows what God’s truth is. If we didn’t have the truth from the risen Jesus and wanted to go to the abyss for it that would mean God would have to raise him again to stop us. This indicates that God raised Jesus from the dead so that Jesus would be able to reveal God’s truth. Jesus did not do that when he was a man. He did it after he died and rose again.

Jesus needed to die and rise again after meeting God so he can tell us what God revealed. This makes philosophy a sin for it questions all things to gain understanding and wisdom. You don’t go to philosophy you go to dogma, Jesus’ dogma. Or rather the dogma of those who claim to be in touch with him!

If you can’t go to Heaven itself to find the truth but have to have Christ then Paul is being totally insane. He is saying it is better to listen to hearsay from an appearance of the resurrected Jesus than to see and hear the truth yourself in God’s own home place Heaven! This is extreme dogmatism. It calls into question the sincerity and reliability of Paul as an alleged apostle of Christ.

Some reply that there is hyperbole in what Paul wrote: you can’t get God’s truth in Heaven or in the abyss unless God gives you the power to so Paul is saying that even if God does that we should decline and go to Jesus. It’s exaggeration to make a point. It’s just like when Paul said one time that an angel from Heaven is to be ignored if it comes preaching a different gospel from his. And the point is, not “don’t accept truth even from God if he wants to give it to you. Go to the risen Jesus and the point is that nothing should make up our minds for us but Jesus and the word he brought.” That is the exaggeration. The point is, “Go to the risen Jesus only and disregard all communications from God – they cannot be genuine when they are not from Jesus risen.” The charge of extreme dogmatism still stands. Obviously it is no good if somebody else has the truth from Jesus and you go to them. You have to go to Jesus himself – he has to appear to you and tell you. Listening to somebody telling you what Jesus told them is as bad as not going directly to Jesus for many misinterpret and lie about his teaching.

The gospel Jesus then was a pack of lies, perhaps good ones and perhaps based on the lives and teachings of some Jewish saints to make them look real but lies all the same.

Now if you search in the underworld for the gospel, meaning if you have to learn it from spirits for corpses can’t teach it, then you need Jesus to rise again anew to get it for he is the only being in the next world that can be trusted in religion. He must be a spirit or a resurrected being. Resurrected bodies don’t live in the underworld so spirit is the only option. .

He has to be raised up again to teach you because you weren’t satisfied with what he already revealed and if you don’t accept what he revealed to you when he rose to teach you, you need him to rise again and again and again. It seems that Jesus appearing to people is referred to as a resurrection just like the Old Testament referred to the dead Samuel as being raised though Samuel complains about being disturbed as if he were alive already. Now Samuel was a ghost.

This eliminates any possibility of the Jesus resurrection having being a bodily one for a body can only rise once so the later doctrine of a bodily resurrection was a pack of lies. It was a spiritual resurrection though perhaps a seed was taken from the old body for the sake of continuity. Jesus could have more than one risen spiritualised body so he can teach many people at a time. The empty tomb was being denied. Jesus’ resurrection was spiritual because Paul is on about needing spirits to teach the gospel and so Jesus would be irrelevant if he were not just a phantom. Jesus has to rise anew to teach you if you reject the teaching of Paul as his word and are searching for his word.

Why would Jesus have to rise anew if you need the word and can go to the underworld for it? The shocking answer is that Paul means you have to become like a spiritualist medium and induce visions to make Jesus appear. Jesus was raised in the early Church allegedly by the power of God the same way Samuel was raised by the witch of Endor in the Old Testament. You can’t get the word from people who knew Jesus as a man for they don’t exist. You have to get it by becoming an occultist. Spiritism, communication with the dead, was strictly forbidden by the Law of Moses under pain of death. Paul would have had his excuses for getting around that prohibition. The usual one is that mediumistic powers are gifts from God. But the trouble with that is that any medium could justify her or his disobedience of the Law of Moses which was inspired by Yahweh with that excuse. But how could Paul say that Jesus would need to rise again all over again to appear to other people to bring them the word of God? The answer is that only a resurrected being like Jesus has the authority and knowledge to inform you about the things of God.

The apostles deliberately produced their visions of Jesus because there was no historical Jesus to learn from. If there had been, they would dwelt on his memory and him rather than resort to dubious practices that they could have been put to death for by the blasphemy hating Jews. And to claim to be apostles on the basis of apparitions left the road open for rivals to do the same thing and sow division and discord in the Church. This happened too. It was very serious. The gospels are deceptively interpreted by crafty Christians as saying the appearances of the risen Jesus were unexpected but they never say that. John says that Peter did not understand that Jesus had to rise from the dead and we read that he saw Jesus later. But Peter could have expected to see Jesus not as a risen man but as a phantom. Or Peter could have started to understand later and then had his vision. The same applies to the other visionaries who supposedly had spontaneous visions of Christ.

That is the problem with Christian apologetics: they read stuff into the text that is not there to make it look more convincing but it fails for it is just speculation that is imposed on the text.

After going through a list of preachers among the Romans, Paul calls the gospel “my gospel” when it would be more natural to say, “our gospel” (Romans 16:25). So he is the origin of the gospel. He means it was revealed to him alone for he says it was hid from endless ages. He could have said “gospel of the apostles” or “gospel of the Lord” but he did not for he clearly meant the gospel started with him for the other expressions would be better and reminders that it was the gospel of God. That is the only reason why he could write so as to be interpreted that way. If the gospel started with him then it did not start with a historical Jesus and Jesus did not bother with gospelling when he was alive on earth – an existence for which the only evidence was happened to be visions.

In Philippians 2 we have a piece of poetry that is undoubtedly and universally considered to be one of the earliest creeds of the Church. It would have been recited or used as a hymn in Paul’s Churches. It tells us that though the Messiah Jesus was in the form of God, he did not cling to the idea of being equal with God but emptied himself to become a servant born in human likeness. He humbled himself and obeyed God even unto death on a cross and God raised him high and gave him the name which is above all names so that everybody in heaven and earth would bow at the name of Jesus. Christians say that the name which is above all names is full authority, name standing for authority like we would say somebody doing something in your name is claiming your authority. But if Jesus were God or even the supreme angel he would have this authority even if he didn’t use it so he could not be said to have been given the name after his obedience unto death. The name thing refers to the name of Jesus, which means saviour. The name of Jesus is the highest name there is because he saves humankind and brings them back to God. God is no good to humanity without the saviour who bears the punishment due to humanity so Jesus though not God but like him bears the highest possible name and is in a real sense just as important as God. So Jesus whoever he was WAS NOT NAMED JESUS UNTIL AFTER HE DIED AND ROSE AGAIN. This completely destroys the credibility of the gospels which have him called Jesus all along and say Joseph and Mary got him that name during his circumcision in the Temple. It is obvious that when the word name is mentioned and then we are told about an actual name that in this context the name was not authority but an actual name.

Jesus was not like God all the time. He had to earn that prerogative by obedience. The oldest saint could be the holiest for having had the earliest start. The fact that God worked this way suggests that Jesus beat other holy men to his level of holiness which indicates that he was the first real good man at least at the time of his death. This in itself indicates that Jesus lived a long time ago for there have been many men who seemed to be saints and who died for others. Jesus did not save lives by his death but many martyrs before him undoubtedly did. He was not the best saint for that reason. What Paul says fits only a man who lived early on in the human race and who achieved such a high exaltation by becoming the first saint with the others lagging behind.

God did not plan this Jesus thing for Jesus had no authority or dignity until he obeyed though God can see the future so it was up to Jesus to become the saviour. Any man then could have become the saviour.

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PAUL ADMITS THE EVIDENCE IS AWFUL!

St Paul was the main founder of the early Christian Church and its real rock. He is the only person who wrote about his experience of apparitions of the risen Jesus. He is the person we must study if we wish to know the how and possibly why of these apparitions. Yet he let it slip that he wasn’t sure how real his visions were!

He wrote in Philippians that he didn’t know if it was best for him to die or to live. He was in a dilemma he said. Both dying and living were equally appealing to him because if he died he would go to Jesus to be with him forever and if he lived he would be able to serve his friends on earth and teach them the good news. He admitted that it is far better to die and go to Jesus. But he added, “But to remain in my body is more needful and essential for your sake” (Philippians 1:23). This doesn’t show much confidence in God. It shows even less in Jesus. Paul believed that nobody can die unless God wills it. God has to let them die. And if God needs a person to live no power on earth will be able to destroy that person. Also Paul talks as if he cannot be done without which blasphemes the providence of God. If Paul were to die then God could get somebody else to take his place. If Paul really couldn’t be done without then the other apostles were useless and so were their successors and that is what he thought. And the Church fell into apostasy and away from divine protection when he died. If he was so sure that he was so essential then it is no wonder he got martyred if that happened. And he wasn’t a real martyr for he was so sure he would be saved. One way Paul had confidence in God and in another he hadn’t. But if Paul was really sure of his visions and if his Jesus had been a miracle-worker there is no way he would have written the way he did. He speaks as a doubter and doubters doubt things here and there but not everything. If the gospel portrait of Jesus is true it would have been impossible for Paul to have been like this.

Paul spends some time in 1 Corinthians trying to make rival or heretical apostles who were having visions and experiences of the divine look pathetic. In 2 Corinthians 12:1 Paul says he will not boast. He then says he knows a man who had mystical experiences fourteen years before. He says he doesn’t know if the man was in the body or out of it. This refers to the idea of the person being separable from the body which you get in traditional Christianity. The soul is the real person and the body only some accessory that it drags around. He says the man went to the third heaven and heard things that no man is allowed to mention and of him he will boast. He then admits that he himself is this man and that God afflicted him for being proud of his experience. He says he can’t reveal what was revealed to him. He did reveal the resurrection of Jesus so it was separate from all this. Had he been so proud of the resurrection visions he had he wouldn’t have needed to go into this experience.

The fact that Paul decided not to say he was the man indicates that he never mentioned it to anybody. And he says he is boasting about it. What is there to boast about? He doesn’t tell us what happened or what was said. That is strange boasting. You boast to make others feel inferior but you can’t do that if you won’t go into details. You wouldn’t want to boast about things you can’t detail. Johnny doesn’t boast about winning the lotto if he doesn’t want people to know how much he got or work it out. He says he boasts of this man (12:5) which is odd when he doesn’t tell us who he is. By now we can see that the man has to be himself after all for there is no point in boasting about a stranger whose identity you won’t reveal. Later in the chapter Paul changed his mind and admitted to being the man (see verse 7) and said that he got a chastisement from God to keep him humble despite having so many revelations. He said God punished him for his pride about the experiences and here he was tempting God to have another go! Doesn’t sound very believable or respectful of God. Perhaps Paul didn’t care what God did to him for boasting because as long as he could rival or surpass the rival apostles. This shows an extreme bias, all he cares about is his point of view. He even goes as far as to boast about nothing! Paul then boasts in verse 11 that he is in no way inferior in miracles or otherwise to his rival apostles. He talks as if their visions and miracles are as impressive as his. Such a person cannot be trusted. He is like a person who has the same credentials as somebody else and is acting like the other persons are not as good as his. His letters should be thrown out of the New Testament. The saying he won’t boast and then doing it despite the threats of God indicate a sick mind.

That Paul didn’t boast about his visions of the risen Jesus is telling. It indicates that he wasn’t very impressed by them himself. It also indicates that his rivals reported them too and that they said they were taught their heresies by those apparitions. He couldn’t prove they were lying and had to resort to nasty tricks to fight their influence. Seeing the risen Jesus is more important than any heavenly vision. Yet he boasted about an inferior experience and kept it quiet for fourteen years as if it was the only important experience he ever had. If that experience was the most important then we have the right to doubt the veracity and reality of his visions of Jesus. He even treats the experience as something that other people should be impressed by though he won’t say much about it and there is no reason why it should make a good and lasting impression. When he expects people to be impressed by it he can’t think very much of his visions of Jesus. He didn’t consider them sacred enough to keep secret for years.

Paul was declaring the experience he had fourteen years before to be the most important thing that happened to him and his answer to all heretics and the reason his followers should keep listening to him. The resurrection appearances by implication were declared to be nothing. It is possible that Paul had a mystical experience and from it worked out that Jesus died and rose again. Perhaps at the time he thought the Old Testament predicted a dying and rising saviour and took the experience to be confirmation of this. Perhaps he saw an entity calling itself Jesus and concluded it was the risen Messiah though the vision never said so. Perhaps the whole death and resurrection story was just an inference and was not revealed by a miracle from Heaven. That means there is no evidence at all that Jesus died and rose and that Paul saw him as a resurrected being. He says elsewhere that he has seen Jesus the Lord. If the thinking in this paragraph is right then we can safely say that the early Christians may not have had visions of a man claiming to have risen from the dead at all but visions of a heavenly being they interpreted as a risen being but who gave no justification for this inference. Nothing in Paul’s writings or in the accounts of those who reported visions actually states that the being said it was a resurrected being. However the view that the vision did say it was a risen crucifixion victim is a useful framework for interpreting the resurrection appearances stories.

The Jerusalem apostles accepted Paul as a minister of the gospel and naturally that his apparitions were genuine. They accepted that deranged impostor – what does that say about their own visions of the risen Jesus? Nothing good!

Perhaps some might say that since the fourteen years before event seems to be about the time Paul fell off his horse near Damascus we could surmise that he had a near death experience and saw the being of light and read all this Christian stuff into the experience. Perhaps that was the only vision he had of Jesus. The others might just have been visions revealed in dreams or in the imagination both of which Christian mystics regards as possible vehicles for divine communication. Skeptics will say that the Damascus vision was caused by a blow to the head and was nothing more!

When the evidence is that bad for the basis of Christian faith, the resurrection appearances, and the apostles are desperate for evidence and scrap the bottoms of barrels it is undeniable that the gospels version of Jesus is entirely fiction.

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JESUS’ DEATH WAS REVEALED TO PAUL!

If Jesus’ death was not a death as we know it but a mystical metaphysical event that only a mystic can understand the mechanics of then it was revealed to Paul and was not a historical event on earth.

In Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, chapter 15, we find incontestable proof that Paul was not only into twisting facts to trick people into agreeing with him but had no evidence at all apart from ghost stories and perverted thinking that Jesus existed. His problem with the Christians of Corinth was that many of them were saying that Jesus never rose from the dead and that there is no resurrection. We know that Paul could not say that Jesus’ death and burial were real and use secular sources and testimonies to prove that. There is no point in trying to convince people who think the resurrection never happened that a resurrection is possible without showing that the resurrected man was dead in the first place. What he had to do was say that Jesus must have risen for it is unbearable if he did not. So he thinks that Jesus rose therefore he died! The reason he thinks Jesus rose is because he appeared in visions! So visions then are the basis for belief in the death of Christ.

When Paul sought to convince the Corinthians that Jesus rose from the dead instead of trying to persuade them that Jesus had really died as we would expect he used a dreadfully weak argument: If Jesus is not raised then our faith is in vain and we are all lost which is too awful to be true so Jesus was raised. Extraordinary. He was between a huge rolling rock and a hard place. He could think of nothing else for there was nothing else and he thought that as awful as this argument was it would have to do. There was no evidence for Jesus’ life and death and resurrection except for what he and the apostles were told in visions and even he knew it was skating on thin ice to try and convince sceptics with them even if he had mentioned them. He did nothing to suggest that that testimony was valid except give this amateur argument.

Paul did not say that Jesus said he would rise from the dead and said he rose from the dead after he rose like the gospels say. He could not resort to the empty tomb for help. This refutes the gospels’ evidence. When heretics could deny the resurrection which was the paramount thing in the Church and not be adequately answered then why could Christ not have been an invention?

Paul never mentioned the empty tomb. He said that we are buried in baptism and rise like Christ. But that could still be said if the new body in the resurrection, takes only a few cells from the old leaving the dead one lying there. He stated in Romans that we are buried by baptism into Jesus’ death not his tomb. He said that flesh and blood cannot enter the kingdom of Heaven and that Jesus had a spiritual body since the resurrection which makes a liar of Luke’s story that Jesus ate fish after his resurrection. The only time Paul says that Jesus was buried is in 1 Corinthians 15. There buried is just an incidental detail for Paul’s real concern is saying that Jesus died and rose and was seen. So Paul may have just assumed that Jesus was buried for to him it is nothing important. The burial would not be necessary to our salvation and the salvific events are the ones Paul is concentrating on. It is also interesting that since Paul says Jesus was buried and rose on the third day he may mean that Jesus rose the third day after burial and could have just been a pile of bones by the time he was buried.

Paul said that he received the information that Jesus died for our sins according to the scriptures (1 Corinthians 15:3). It would seem then that if Jesus died recently Paul would not have to receive that news from God. But some say that what Paul received was not that Jesus died but that he died for sinners in accordance with the scriptures. But the problem is, how do you know? Paul would have written that Christ died and then that he received that this was for sinners. That would be clearer. Paul was probably saying he learned about the Messiah’s death in a revelation for the death is the main point in the sentence for the scriptures saying a death was needed would not be enough for that would not prove a death happened. Paul had to be told in a vision that Jesus died. Paul worked in Judea and Jerusalem and would not have needed to learn in a vision that Jesus died if Jesus died in 30 to 33AD in Jerusalem. He persecuted Christians so he would have known from them that Jesus died. Paul is indicating that when he needed a vision he hadn’t believed that Jesus died or lived until he got a vision to confirm that these things had happened.

In Galatians 5:11, Paul declares that if he preaches circumcision the stumbling block of the cross is removed. This is plainly saying that to accept circumcision is denying the cross happened. Theologically this is nonsense. And Paul would have known it for there were a lot of different views in early Christianity. Millions have believed in the cross as a vehicle of salvation and atonement without believing that it abolished good works and religious rites as specified in the Law of Moses. Catholics follow a replacement for the Law of Moses and still believe that Jesus died in their place for their sins. You could have circumcision without denying the cross. Notice that he doesn’t say denying the atonement or the propitiation but the cross, the historical event. Clearly, then if you accept circumcision you contradict Jesus who told the Church about the cross and if you contradict Jesus you also deny that he was reliable in relation to the cross having happened. To deny one then is to deny the other.

Perhaps when Jesus revealed in visions to the apostles that he was nailed to a cross he stated it had to happen to free Christians from circumcision for the gospels never portray a Jesus who was that emphatic about doing this. There is nothing else that could make the cross and the abolition of the law so inseparable. But this would be saying Paul should have written that the block of the propitiation is removed by accepting circumcision. If he didn’t mean that then why didn’t he say so?

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SHOCKERS FROM THE BELOVED DISCIPLE!

The beloved disciple, the one who claimed he was especially close to Jesus Christ, wrote in John 1.18 that nobody ever saw God but that his only Son Jesus is the one that made him known. He is clearly hinting that nobody before Jesus had revelations from God that could express what God was. He is saying we need Jesus to know God for we cannot see God. He is clearly saying then that it is Jesus who is the word of God and not any scripture. Scripture is second-hand and therefore of no value. Its not scripture really. It’s just words. He is probably writing the gospel for it is better than nothing. The Jesus of the other three gospels does not agree that nobody can know God without him. He regarded the scriptures as revelations of what God was like while John’s Jesus does not though he saw them just as revelations of facts and not of what God was like in himself. The John gospel then denies the Jesus of these gospels. It says he never existed.

The Christians argue that John means that the Son did make God known before he physically appeared on earth for he spoke to the prophets. But the verse plainly says that God needed to be made known for nobody had ever seen him and somebody that did see him had to do this. This would make no sense if a prophet who had not seen him but was getting revelations would do. It must also imply that we have to have a mystical experience and see Jesus in visions and see for ourselves before we can know God. This is contrary to the apostles’ teaching and limits the true Christian faith to a handful of mystics. So mysticism and visions then produced the gospel not history though what he author knew of history and geography may have got worked into his experiences. He may have believed that when he saw the blood from Jesus’ side at the cross that it was a mystical presence with Jesus suffering not an actual one. St Francis of Assisi used to have visions in which he witnessed the crucified Jesus and was with him.

The John author claimed obliquely that he lay on Jesus’ breast the night Jesus was betrayed. His is the only gospel that talks like an eyewitness account. He claimed to be Jesus’ favourite disciple. Yet he hinted a lot that his Jesus was a mythological figure, a parable or a spiritual abstract divine force that could behave like a personal being.

The author of the John gospel wrote three epistles.

The First Epistle of John chapter 1 has some mysterious we saying they have seen and touched the word of God which was intended to silence heretics who denied the coming of Jesus in the flesh and that he was the Messiah. But it is not said if he was touched like a man or if he was touched in a vision. The heretics that the authors had to contend with said that Jesus was only a spiritual being appearing in a vision that could only seem to be touched. Yet the author gives no adequate reply to them. This tells us that there was no evidence for the reality of Jesus or that the heretics believed that Jesus was not a person but a symbol or perhaps there was no evidence and the heretics denied the existence of Jesus. They probably considered Jesus to be a myth that had spiritual significance. The author knew that touching and seeing Jesus would not shut the heretics up but he still pretended he thought it would. He was desperate for evidence that did not exist. Or his saying about the seeing and touching was meant to stop heretics saying Jesus was not a vision or a man but a myth. Either way proves there was no Jesus at all.

John called these heretics Antichrists. John says that the Antichrist is coming but many Antichrists have come which indicates that it is the last hour (1 John 2:18). There must have been a huge number of them and they must have been putting the Church in real danger of losing the faith meaning Jesus would soon have to bring about the last day before the Church would be annihilated for Jesus promised there would always be true believers. John says the Antichrist is nigh which is why he used the expression hour and not year or week to accentuate that it was a short time.

John says that the Antichrists are denying that Jesus came in the flesh and was the Christ. So we have a plethora of people who regarded Jesus as important but denied that he was a real flesh and blood man and who denied that he ever claimed to be the Christ. They contradicted nearly everything in the gospels by saying that. If Jesus never claimed to be the Christ then all the sermons in which he claimed to fulfil Old Testament prophecy are fabrications and he never rode into Jerusalem on a donkey to the cheers of the people like the Messiah was supposed to do. Maybe he only just did it but wasn’t meaning to fulfil prophecy. These witnesses were saying that the gospels are untrue. There might have been no gospels in those days but it does not matter. They were still proving that the gospel Jesus never existed. To ridicule these witnesses to the absence of historical data as heretics is totally foul and unfair and fraudulent for we know nothing about them as people. To say that Jesus existed despite them is as bad as saying that Jack is guilty of murder and not interviewing the witnesses who say they know he is innocent. When the Christians like John were boasting about being of God and saying that anybody that would not listen to their gospel was not of God (1 John 4:6) it is plain that they were too hellbent on convincing people and making threats and causing sectarianism to be trusted. Such nastiness only becomes an option when people know deep down that their opponents or maybe are right.

Why would the heretics deny that Jesus was the Christ? They had no need to deny that Jesus was the Christ. They could have reinterpreted the title and held that Jesus was a spirit that had legal authority from David to rule Israel. These traditions must have been created out of the knowledge that there was no man called Christ and there was no historical Jesus. But if Christ had to mean a man sent by God as king they would have denied that Jesus was the Christ. The Christians used that interpretation of Christ which explains why the heretics said Jesus was not the Christ.

The heretics denied the coming of Jesus in the flesh. They may have said that Jesus was a vision because matter was evil so being good he could not take a human body. Why did these heretics deny that Jesus was a man at the start if there was a man called Jesus for that would not have made them very plausible? Why did they risk destroying their message by adopting an unpopular and unusual opinion if that was what their opinion was? If they wished to subvert the Church as the epistles of John says then they could have done that better by seeming to have had a lot in common with the Church. Their testimony then is very powerful. It is a convincing witness that Jesus was a myth or a person a religion assumed who existed without evidence. But even then they or some of them could have believed that Jesus was a spirit that did not get entangled in matter but just spoke to inspired men.

Why does John find it so offensive that they denied that Jesus came in the flesh and was the Christ that he singles these two things out? Since the Church taught that Jesus suffered to save us it would not matter as long as they believed that he suffered for sins and he could do that without being a material being. You would expect him to focus on that if they denied that which they must have done. How do I know this? Because they must have reasoned that since Jesus did not have a body he did not atone for sins and that was why their denying the flesh was such a problem. Yet John dwells on their denial of the flesh of Christ. The reason he does that is because he hates them saying Jesus never lived as a man because it is true. John’s reaction to the heretics shows that he was sure they were right about Jesus. That was why he was so deeply hostile to them.

John said that we must test the spirits and we must do it by asking each spirit if it believes that Jesus Christ came in the flesh. If it says he has then it is from God (1 John 4:1-3). Had there been acceptable gospels or records about Jesus in those days he would have told us to check what the spirit says alongside their statements. (He hadn’t even thought of writing his yet.) That would be a more reliable and thorough test. A spirit could tell you that Jesus came in the flesh and was the Christ and still lead you astray. How would you know the spirit would mean it when it says Jesus was the Christ and came in the flesh? My belief is that John would have replied that because there was no evidence for the existence of Jesus Christ apart from a few men claiming visions of him that no demon would say Jesus existed. That is the only way to make sense of John here. Plainly John could not do any better. His gospel was a mystical novel not a biography of a real person who could be touched and talked to. He as good as tells us that straight out.

The way John talks shows plainly that there was no historical evidence for the existence of Jesus for he couldn’t use that history. He either didn’t know of any gospels or knew they were fiction if he did.

John’s own gospel then was believed to have come from spiritual communication with a spirit and he did not claim that there was any scientific or historical verification for it. He did not want anybody to regard his gospel as reliable unless the spirit told them it was. It was not history that was meant to verify the gospel but a sense that God was revealing things to you. He would have approved of people rejecting his gospel as drivel but only if they were sure the spirit of God was telling them that. He was rejecting the view that any other gospels should be accepted because of an alleged historical foundation. Matthew, Mark and Luke then would have been advocating that view so the John Gospel rejects their canonicity. It tells us not to trust them.

At least some of the heretics might not have believed that there was an apparition of Jesus teaching in the early thirties of the first century in Palestine or that it was important if they did believe. What was imperative to them was their experience of Jesus now. It was what Jesus communicated to them now that mattered. This Jesus could have been a part of an impersonal God and more like a force that works on the mind like a person rather than a real person. He could have been a force from Heaven for guiding them. The heretics did claim guidance by spirits from Heaven which shows that it makes sense to hold that they would have considered what Jesus was saying to them to be what counted.

The same Epistle teaches that the children of God love one another. They love one another because it is easy for them to keep the commandments of God because they believe in Jesus as the Son of God and whoever does that overcomes evil (5:1-9). This insults unbelievers and accuses them of not being able to be as good as Christians. John cannot be trusted with his portrait of Jesus when he had such an arrogant and self-important and plain horrid agenda. Plus the Jesus of his gospel is quite stroppy in relation to the Jews which means that his Jesus’ argument that the world must see how Christians love one another and be impressed by it so that they see the work of grace in it has no meaning for if you can be nasty in the name of love people are not going to think there is anything special about you.

John said that there are three witnesses that God has given for Jesus being the Son of God which are water, blood and the Spirit which all testify to each other telling the truth. He says this is God’s testimony, its composed of those three, and God’s testimony is better than any human testimony though human testimony has its uses.

The Christians say he means that the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan, the blood of the cross and the Holy Spirit testify to Jesus. But then why didn’t he say baptism or even better baptism in the Jordan? Why does he say the blood for what would that have to do with showing he was the Son of God? Paul said the blood was an embarrassment.

Others say it is our baptism represented by the water and our Eucharist represented by the blood and the Holy Spirit that testify by giving us the grace to see who Jesus is. But when the Holy Spirit works through the sacraments that interpretation cannot be right for that is the one witness and the passage says there are three. And why would John describe the sacraments so vaguely? The sacraments were never claimed to miraculously and instantly make you see that it is probable that the claims made for Christ are true. All Christians see them as helps for the journey to a stronger faith.

John is clear that the water, blood and Spirit are not human testimonies but divine. They have something to do with what God shows the individual Christian. They have nothing to do with human agency because John’s argument that the divine revelation was better than human revelation would not work if we had to listen to men telling us what God has done for that is human testimony. They stand for three mystical experiences that give you a visionary experience of Jesus. John’s Christians then got their faith by unusual experiences unlike the rest. The water and the blood stand for techniques used to cause the experiences. They describe forms of torture that induce visions. The gospel Jesus needed to have the visions himself this same way in order to learn who and what he was. Verse 10 tells us that whoever believes in Jesus has the testimony in himself – it’s a private mystical experience. Whoever does not have this testimony is calling God a liar and does not believe. So the experience not gospel stories could make you believe. They cannot make you believe because there is no evidence only spiritual mystical evidence. This is why John said earlier that anybody who belongs to God does not need a teacher but has the light of God inside his heart that tells him what to believe and to stand by what he has been taught from the start (2:27). So why did John write a gospel? Probably to express what he felt he was told about Jesus in visions for he made it clear that the only evidence for Jesus was “supernatural” mystical experiences.

John, allegedly the youngest apostle of Jesus, is supposed to have written these things. If he did then we have an apostle telling us Jesus never really existed as a man. Or that if he did exist, evidence was irrelevant or non-existent.

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OBJECTOR ANSWERED

The book, St Paul Versus St Peter, considers all the evidence about disputes in the early Church and concludes that the heresy that Jesus was an apparition not a man was not what was combated in the New Testament and by the earliest fathers such as Ignatius of Antioch.

The book argues that there was a schism between Paul’s Church and the Peter Church in Jerusalem. The latter followed the Law of Moses and held that Jesus was born of Mary and Joseph without a virgin birth. They held that the highest angel in Heaven was the Christ. The man Jesus of Nazareth was an ordinary man who was possessed by the Christ at his baptism by John in the Jordan. The Holy Spirit was the Christ so when Jesus was possessed by the Holy Spirit it was the same as saying he was possessed by the Christ. From then on he was able to do miracles. The Christ didn’t die on the cross for he left Jesus before then so Jesus died on the cross and Christ didn’t. Christ only seemed to die for it wasn’t obvious that he had left. Jesus rose again and Christ reunited with him again. So Jesus died and rose but Christ didn’t. It is held that with this theology, it is easy to misinterpret and think that Jesus was the same person all the time as the Christ. This would give the impression that it was being said that the death and resurrection was an illusion or something. However there is absolutely nothing to indicate that the book is right.

The book correctly observes that the heretics in Corinth who Paul had to convince that Jesus Christ rose from the dead were saying that the kingdom of God had come and they were reigning with Christ (page 39, 1 Corinthians 4:8). The book says Paul was angry and sarcastic about this for he didn’t believe the kingdom had already come. This is incorrect for Paul complains that they were saying they were reigning without Paul and Co. He is not saying the kingdom isn’t here but that they are not in the kingdom for they are against Paul and the authorised teachers set up by Christ.

The book says that Paul contradicts their claim to be in the kingdom already for flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom (1 Corinthians 15:50) meaning flesh and blood as they are now. This would mean that Paul is denying the gospel teaching that the kingdom of God already exists (eg Matthew 12:28). This again would prove he never knew the gospel Jesus. The simplest meaning is that if you are a physical being you are a weak being and so cannot fit in in heaven. You need to be turned into a supernatural spiritual being that has little or no physicality to enter Heaven. This suggests that Jesus’ body didn’t rise though part of it may have been a seed for the new spiritual body.

The book reminds us of where Paul told the Corinthians that when the Holy Spirit inspires somebody to speak they cannot say Jesus be accursed and only the Holy Spirit can make a person say that Jesus is Lord (1 Corinthians 12:3). This totally contradicts his view that Satan pretends to be a sweet loving angel of light. Satan can confess that Jesus is Lord to bait souls. Satan cannot lure people into error unless he uses plenty of the truth. The implication is that if a person says they have had a vision from Jesus they are telling the truth and it is from God. This is totally ridiculous. Paul does not talk like a person who was really having visions for such a one would know what they are talking about. He talks like a fraud.

The book also says that Paul said that Jesus was genomenou or conceived as in coming from a human father (page 101) against the teaching of two of the gospels.

The book distorts the saying of Ignatius that Jesus Christ truly was born, ate and drank, crucified and died and if his death was an illusion then Ignatius wouldn’t be in chains. This statement of Ignatius clearly refers to Docetists but the book says it refers to people who denied that Christ died when Jesus died! If Ignatius meant that he wouldn’t have used the words Jesus Christ but only Christ. And why would he stress that Jesus Christ was a real physical being?

The First Epistle of John says that whoever denies that Jesus Christ has not come in the flesh is not of God. It also says that of those who deny that Jesus is the Christ. Despite the fact that the epistle never indicates that anybody was separating Jesus from Christ and despite the fact that it never indicates that there were followers of Jesus who denied he was the Christ, the book says it condemns the theology that was allegedly followed in Jerusalem by Peter and Co that Jesus was possessed by a godlike spirit called the Christ! Jesus was not the Christ but indwelled by a spirit being called the Christ. Docetists often believed that Jesus was an apparition that never came in the flesh and which wasn’t the Christ for Christ was the title of the political king of the Jews while Jesus was anti-world and anti-politics.

On page 139 the book discusses Romans 8 where Paul says that his Church members cannot be separated from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus by trials or tribulations, or heavenly powers, angels or principalities. It says he has the idea of angels sending trouble to test our love of God.

Chapter 21 asks why Jesus calls himself the Son of Man so much in the gospels. It rejects the traditional Christian lie that it refers to Jesus being a supernatural godlike being like the being called the Son of Man in the book of Daniel in the Old Testament for that book says the entity is LIKE a son of man. The title means ordinary man whether it refers to you or me or Jesus or even if it refers to an angel who became incarnate as Jesus and lived as a real ordinary man. The title is used so much in the gospels that the proper conclusion is this. Jesus is stressing that he is a real man. That shows how much his reality was being questioned in the years that produced the gospels. It shows that the writers invented stories about him to counteract ideas current in the time they were writing that they didn’t like.

Despite quoting Paul complaining that some Corinthians were saying there is no resurrection from the dead the book argues that they didn’t deny that Jesus rose. But Paul had to tell them that Jesus did rise for if he didn’t the dead are lost! The book says that their question about what kind of body the dead rise with shows the issue was not about the resurrection but about whether the resurrection was physical or non-physical (spiritual). But it could be just as easily a question that is meant to show up the silliness of saying that there is a resurrection. They could still be people who don’t believe in a resurrection of any kind. The book argues that Paul when he defended the resurrection against the heretics was defending the body resurrection idea. There is no evidence for that view and reading 1 Corinthians 15 disproves it. Paul argues for the resurrection. A spiritual resurrection is still a resurrection and Paul never makes it clear that the body rises though the body has the seed of the resurrection body which is more like a gas and basically a spirit type body. If Paul was defending the idea of body resurrection as against spiritual then why did he argue that Jesus was seen? Jesus being seen doesn’t mean Jesus was physically raised. Also, when Paul argued that the resurrection happens and it results in a transformed body that is so like a spirit how can one say this is an answer to those who deny the physical resurrection but affirm the spiritual? You can’t expect to refute heretics by teaching stuff that is close to their heresy. The heretics may have believed in a symbolic or mystical resurrection but not in a physical or spiritual one. Heretics like Hymenaeus and Philetus (2 Timothy 2:18) who were saying the resurrection had happened already for everybody believed in that kind of resurrection. They didn’t interpret the word as dead bodies coming to life but as people who were spiritually dead coming to spiritual life. They believed that Jesus’ resurrection and ours is one and the same. Paul taught that we died and have risen again with Jesus like they did (Romans 6). His problem was not with this teaching but with the idea that the resurrection was not bringing bodies back to a transformed life. Paul told the heretics that if Christ is not risen then their faith is in vain and the dead are lost forever. From this it seems that the heretics must have denied life after death. The later statement that some are baptised for the dead which is pointless unless they rise again doesn’t suggest that the heretics were baptising for the dead. Yet the book thinks it does. But how could it when Paul mentions it to show that the dead rise? Paul is saying that life after death is impossible unless there will be a resurrection. He sees no point in baptising for the dead if they will survive death but don’t need to rise.

The book gives us no evidence that Docetism was rare and wasn’t a major problem in the earliest Church.

A Separate God, The Christian Origins of Gnosticism, Sophie Petrement, Harper, San Francisco, 1984 is an excellent scholarly argument for the belief that Gnosticism came out of Christianity and was sparked off by the teaching of Paul and the author of the John material in the New Testament. That would mean that Gnostics who regarded Jesus as a vision or a myth not a man were originally regarded as true Christians and later their teaching was suppressed as heresy by the Church Fathers.

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Conclusion

There were many indications from Jesus’ own recognised followers and the Church leaders and from people outside the Church that it was thought apparitions led to faith in Jesus and started the whole Christian movement off. Jesus was an apparition, he never existed. The gospels are lies.

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14 November 2007

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