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Sincere answer:
Jesus was likely an apocalyptic preacher who was crucified by the Romans but developed a following in the course of his ministry. Shortly after his death (and maybe just before), his followers saw him as a man who had the “divine” about him, like a messenger from God. Eventually, his followers started treating him like he was still a man but who was adopted by God as his son. Then eventually (maybe early 2nd century?) you eventually had this notion of Jesus as actually God. They started with a man and kept heaping glory on him until they made him God.
So over the decades, you have all these contradictory texts about Jesus’ divine versus human nature. When you get to the 3rd and 4th centuries, eventually church leaders wanted to create one harmonized view of who Jesus was. But the the problem is your sacred texts all describe him in contradictory and mutually exclusive terms.
So that did they do? They came up with the doctrine of the trinity to try and address all these contradictory views into one doctrine. But the trinity fundamentally does not make sense because it tries to take these contradictory views and mash them into a whole.
A good book if you want to know more is Bart Ehrman’s How Jesus Became God.
The alternate theory is Jesus never existed and Paul was the prophet who spread the religion. Paul is the one who thought Jesus existed in the spirit realm. The last supper appeared to him in a vision as did all the other acts, including his death. So in this version, which is gaining more traction, Jesus was always a part of God because he only dwelt in God's realm. The death, resurrection, all that was given to Paul in his visions and happened outside of heaven but in an spiritual arena.
Now the reason we think this may have been the case is because all of the most original writings in Acts and some of the other books and so on never mention any meeting of Jesus in the flesh or existing in the flesh but he does talk about visions of Jesus. All the writings we have from Paul of Jesus in the flesh are much later additions. Paul is the only author in the bible who could have written about Jesus in the first hand. All other books came much later.
There are a few flaws with this theory and mostly come down to how we think translations of some things should read. It is also important to know that this view is still a minority but the majority of biblical scholars are believers and therefore are quick to dismiss it.
My understanding is that the commonly accepted secular position is that Jesus was a real historic person. How much of that is due to interpretation of Christian scripture?
There are very, very few people who deny Jesus actually existed. It's considered a fringe theory and isn't accepted in current academia. Bart Ehrman is very openly atheist after leaving Christian fundamentalism and he doesn't even consider Jesus mythicists worth responding to.
So is this Paul stuff just as silly?
Kinda? Paul was definitely a huge part of spreading Christianity, but we also know many important churches had no association with him at all. He writes to the Roman church as someone who's never visited them. We never hear of him visiting Alexandria, another very important early Christian site. One of the biggest names at the beginning of the second century is in France (St Irenaeus of Lyon). Paul is a very important part of the early movement, for sure, but the other disciples and their disciples were too.
As far as first hand writings: Paul's letters are the earliest NT docs (1 Thessalonians is early 50s we think), that's true. But a few of the other works aren't much later. For example, Mark's gospel is not that much later, around 60-70CE. Mark very easily could have interviewed eye witnesses or descendants of them, though this point is heavily contested admittedly. But yes, the rest are later. Matthew and John were written later still in the 80s, Revelation and John's Gospel sometime in thr 90s and Acts was probably written around the turn of the century. The pastoral letters may be as late as 125CE. So the foundation of the theory seems okay, but I don't know of any historian or scholar who argued the above theory personally.
Is Q supposed to be meaningfully older than Mark? I know the synoptics all are believed to be taking from it, but I don't remember ever being told how distant of a predecessor it was imagined to be.
I think it's argued to be a sayings text like the Gospel of Thomas compiled in the 40s/50s. I've actually leaned towards scholarship by Mark Goodacre and others who argued against the existence of Q. His books and blogs have more on that, but he's pretty convincing.
Ok so it's like "Jesus was a real guy" but also "Paul is why we know about this real guy"
Right with the exception of Mark's gospel which is independent from Paul. Last time I looked, the non Christian sources' authenticity (Josephus and Tacitus) are debated heavily, and it's been a long time since I've looked at that so I don't know the newest research there.
If you are interested in this, there are hundreds on books on "the historical Jesus" (distinguished from the Jesus of faith). The Oxford Handbooks and Cambridge Companion series are great and approachable or you can go absolutely bonkers with this 3300 page tome. https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=D597337E74CEC5AA08EB9280D05BE570. Also of note, Crossley and Miles approach historical Jesus studies through class conflict in an approachable and easy read: https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=78F35D96CD1497BED0C59C5DD2ACC50F
Paul making up some dude who was the son of God makes no fucking sense when Paul could just say that he was the son of God. Why would Paul make up some dude who could heal people and raise people from the dead when Paul could just say that he himself healed people and he himself raised people from the dead? Like, why would peasants believe some random miracle worker they've never seen before (because he's not real) but not the actual huckster saying that he's a miracle worker? Imagine if Joseph Smith said that he knew a guy who knew a guy who knew another guy who stuck his head in a hat to decipher a bunch of text. Why would anyone remotely believe or care what Joseph Smith had to say?
GOOD post
Yes, i think it’s a solid theory that Jesus the real person believed the world was going to end within his own lifetime or thereabouts. It’s crazy to re-read the gospels with this in mind.