In an attempt to make mythicism seem more plausible, some mythicists attempt to push the time in which the (purely celestial/mythical) activity of Jesus is set back in time, away from the time of Paul, so that the latter would not be in a position to know whether Jesus was a real, historical human being or not.
Like most everything about mythicism, this is not strictly speaking impossible – but neither is it probable, nor is it persuasive.In such contexts I often mention Paul’s references to “the Lord’s brother” and Jesus’ being “of David according to the flesh.” But there is much more to the picture than that, and it is the overall framework of Paul’s Christian faith that mythicism fails to do justice to, and not only individual details.
Paul’s theology is focused on the arrival of the end of the age. Resurrection was not something that just happened to Jesus in Paul’s system. Paul shared the widespread Jewish belief that resurrection was the form that the afterlife would take: God would raise the dead and judge them as part of the process of bringing in his kingdom. To make sense of the oddity of believing that Jesus had been raised independently of the rest of humankind, Paul (like many other early Christians) posited a brief period during which the good news would be proclaimed, and then the end would come. Paul assumed, in 1 Thessalonians, that he would still be alive when this happened.
Are we really to take seriously that Jesus was supposed to have lived in some remote or uncertain time, and that this belief (of which we have no earlier trace whatsoever) suddenly persuaded Paul and others around the middle of the first century that the end of all things was then near? Or even more implausibly, shall we follow the lead of those mythicists who propose that, even though resurrection was a Jewish belief about something that happened to human beings, originally the story of Jesus was not focused on a human person at all, but on a purely celestial savior?
Once again, nothing is impossible. But fortunately most people not engaged in online debates seem to agree that an opinion not having been shown to be impossible does not mean that one has good reason to accept that it is true. Hopefully this brief post provides a broader picture of why the evidence we have from Paul’s letters does not seem to scholars to fit with the claims that some mythicists make. Often it seems to me that the reason mythicism seems plausible to some people is that they understand the meaning of terms like “resurrection” and “Messiah,” the nature of Jesus, and the appropriate way to interpret the Bible (as allegory) not in the way scholars and historians do, but (perhaps somewhat ironically) in the manner advocated in certain strands of the Christian faith. Mythicism is at its heart a rejection of the existence of the “Christ of faith.” But historians have long been investigating, and finding evidence for, a “Jesus of history” who looks very different from the Christ that fundamentalist and mythicist apologists go back and forth about, and either accept or deny in his entirety.
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