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<\/a>Like most everything about mythicism, this is not strictly speaking impossible \u2013 but neither is it probable, nor is it persuasive.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
In such contexts I often mention Paul\u2019s references to \u201cthe Lord\u2019s brother\u201d and Jesus\u2019 being \u201cof David according to the flesh.\u201d But there is much more to the picture than that, and it is the overall framework of Paul\u2019s Christian faith that mythicism fails to do justice to, and not only individual details.<\/p>\n
Paul\u2019s theology is focused on the arrival of the end of the age<\/a>. Resurrection was not something that just happened to Jesus in Paul\u2019s 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\u00a0other 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.<\/div>\n
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Are we really to take seriously that Jesus was\u00a0supposed 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\u00a0then 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?<\/div>\n
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