P
PhilVaz
Guest
Please destroy the “Doherty Thesis” (or one of Doherty’s premises in The Jesus Puzzle) which is:
(1) In Paul’s letters, Jesus Christ is not identified with a recent human man or placed in an earthly setting, much less given a ministry of teaching and miracle-working in Galilee. Instead, he was a heavenly deity who had done his redeeming work in the supernatural dimension. (page 5)
(2) None of the NT epistles identify the divine Son of God and Christ with his recent incarnation, whether this be the man “Jesus of Nazareth” of the Gospels, born of Mary and died under Pilate. There is a “silence” that “Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God and Messiah.” The Jesus of the epistles is not spoken of as a man who had recently lived. (page 14)
(3) The entire corpus of early Christian correspondence gives us no indication that the divine Christ these writers look to for salvation is to be identified with the man Jesus of Nazareth whom the Gospels place in the early first century. (page 15)
(4) The references in the epistles to the “death” and “rising” of Christ are not references to physical events on earth or in history. They are part of the “myth” of the Son, they relate to the activities of this divinity in the supernatural realm. (page 16)
(5) What we find in the letters of Paul and other early writers is a divine Christ, the figure of the Son in heaven. There is no equation with a historical man, a human teacher who had recently lived. Paul believes “in” the Son of God, not that anyone “was” the Son of God. (page 16)
(6) All we find in Paul’s presentation of Christ is this transcendent divine being whose activities are never linked to history or an earthly location, so there is no justification for assuming Paul’s Christ arose out of Jesus of Nazareth, out of the human figure who appears in the Gospels that were written some time after Paul. (page 19)
(7) There is no denying that the earliest Christian record shows us a Jesus who is presented exclusively in mythological, transcendent terms, with no reference to any human career or earthly teachings and deeds. (page 22)
Some of the juiciest quotes from Chapter 1.
Also according to Doherty, modern biblical scholarhip suggests there are only seven genuine Pauline epistles: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippines, 1 Thess, and Philemon (Fr. Raymond Brown agrees with this, so I’ll go along for now). Doherty does admit St. Paul lived.
So try to limit your response to those epistles, but I’ll accept others too. I’m looking for the best passages apart from the Gospels that destroy Doherty’s thesis. These I shall put in my article I am working on.
Phil P
(1) In Paul’s letters, Jesus Christ is not identified with a recent human man or placed in an earthly setting, much less given a ministry of teaching and miracle-working in Galilee. Instead, he was a heavenly deity who had done his redeeming work in the supernatural dimension. (page 5)
(2) None of the NT epistles identify the divine Son of God and Christ with his recent incarnation, whether this be the man “Jesus of Nazareth” of the Gospels, born of Mary and died under Pilate. There is a “silence” that “Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God and Messiah.” The Jesus of the epistles is not spoken of as a man who had recently lived. (page 14)
(3) The entire corpus of early Christian correspondence gives us no indication that the divine Christ these writers look to for salvation is to be identified with the man Jesus of Nazareth whom the Gospels place in the early first century. (page 15)
(4) The references in the epistles to the “death” and “rising” of Christ are not references to physical events on earth or in history. They are part of the “myth” of the Son, they relate to the activities of this divinity in the supernatural realm. (page 16)
(5) What we find in the letters of Paul and other early writers is a divine Christ, the figure of the Son in heaven. There is no equation with a historical man, a human teacher who had recently lived. Paul believes “in” the Son of God, not that anyone “was” the Son of God. (page 16)
(6) All we find in Paul’s presentation of Christ is this transcendent divine being whose activities are never linked to history or an earthly location, so there is no justification for assuming Paul’s Christ arose out of Jesus of Nazareth, out of the human figure who appears in the Gospels that were written some time after Paul. (page 19)
(7) There is no denying that the earliest Christian record shows us a Jesus who is presented exclusively in mythological, transcendent terms, with no reference to any human career or earthly teachings and deeds. (page 22)
Some of the juiciest quotes from Chapter 1.
Also according to Doherty, modern biblical scholarhip suggests there are only seven genuine Pauline epistles: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippines, 1 Thess, and Philemon (Fr. Raymond Brown agrees with this, so I’ll go along for now). Doherty does admit St. Paul lived.
So try to limit your response to those epistles, but I’ll accept others too. I’m looking for the best passages apart from the Gospels that destroy Doherty’s thesis. These I shall put in my article I am working on.
Phil P
I got interested in this after getting “The God Who Wasn’t There” DVD a few months ago, so thank you Brian Flemming. He’ll soon have another exhaustive detailed response to his claims online. 
