http://www.rationalresponders.com/paul_and_identity

The 1 Cor. reference did...obliquely...deal with Jesus' humanity, insofar as it mentioned his death and burial.  (The quick-and-sloppy version: humans die, and get buried; God doesn't.  And yes, this distinction gets funny when talking about the case of Jesus.)

As for the others...perhaps someone wanted to use your issue of the humanity of Jesus as a springboard to discuss *their* topic of choice: the goings-on in the early Christian Church.  Yep...your ideas and questions were irrelevant; the only thing that mattered was that someone saw "an opportunity" to tell you what they just learned at church.  You were supposed to be so impressed that you would immediately abandon all doubts about the existence of God, and forthwith, attend church wherever that individual does.  Or, at least, that's my best guess, given what you've said so far.

I don't mean to be insulting.  But this is the natural conclusion I would draw, based on available evidence.  In short, I smell a rat.  For the record, I hope I'm wrong.

Conor

Hmm, i checked http://www.biblegateway.com/, under the New International Version, and found very little relevance to jesus behing a human in these passages.

He gets close when he says that jesus 'appeared' to him, but what distinguishes this from being a non-human appearance?

The rest of these passages seem not to refer to the topic of jesus being human at all, I'm confused, maybe I looked up the wrong ones?

I don't know if Rook has seen this thread or not.  I sent him a quick message asking him to take a look.  If anyone on the site can give you sources, he can.

posts made by theists in the "Freethinking Anonymous" forum will be DELETED

READ THE RULES

posts made by theists in the "Freethinking Anonymous" forum will be DELETED

READ THE RULES

posts made by theists in the "Freethinking Anonymous" forum will be DELETED

READ THE RULES

If you're going to attempt "funny", don't forget to actually bring the said "funny". 

Unless of course, your brand of humor was more subtle and displays itself in Misspellings, improper use of past tense or having a screen name that evokes an homage to Pedophilia, in which case...naw, I'm still searching for the humor.

Oh, and also, maybe you should re-consider the wisdom of declaring every historian's opinions that were "pagan" or lack the label christian, as "null and void". 

Again, I would recommend everyone review my blog article on Paul here.

How does the sentence below refer to apostles? He is simply pointing out that Paul thinks of Jesus as some type of immaterial being... a vision, an angel, a ghost-like aparation, etc.

"1. Flemming says, "Paul doesn't believe that Jesus was ever a human being. He's not even aware of the idea! And he's the link between the time frame given the life of Jesus and the appearance of the gospel account of that life."

Paul poses several interpretational problems, even for christians, though one might be forgiven for not being exactly aware of this given the certitude with which Paul is a) represented as material evidence, if not a witness, for the physical existence of a Jesus character as having lived where and when tradition asserts, and b) represented as a real person himself. From an historical point of view, and using the criteria normally applied to gauging the athenticity of traditional claims, Paul himself deserves a little more scepticism than theists afford him.

The collection of writings presented through the bible in the form of "his collected works" has been problematic to the church authorities for almost as long as the authorities have existed. They have been suspected, even by scholars who themselves were committed christians, as having been penned by more than one hand - an attribute of style that has never been successfully explained away, though the more frequent explanation concentrates on the assumption that he changed his style to suit his audience and intention, be it proselytizing or keeping tabs on his existing "flock". Unfortunately this explanation does not adequately account for the shifting relationship as expressed in the letters between Paul and Jesus, who alternates between real person and deity but with never a hint from the author as to how he himself has reconciled the two definitions. For a proselytizer, and without the benefit of centuries of subsequent theological interpretation concentrated exactly on this dichotomy, it is very "fuzzy thinking" and would have been more confusing than convincing to a prospective audience of converts.

The failure on the part of any other contemporary source to corroborate the assumptions that have grown up around this character, as with Jesus, has not deterred either from having acquired accredited historical status through simple assertion that they must have existed. But again, from a solely historical point of view, this is inadequate. All that can be truly deduced from the remaining data is that proselytization of the Jewish spin-off faith existed and that even in such an early manifestation of the belief system being propagated, there was a simultaneous need - probably expressed by different people for different cultural reasons - to predicate their belief on the fact that Jesus was a human being and that Jesus was a euphemism for deity. The two ideas, now enshrined within the trinity concept which of course had to be devised later to accommodate such divergent notions, were at the time exclusive of each other.

The idea that there was one man called Paul who happily preached both versions without ever tackling the inherent contradiction, and despite contradicting himself repeatedly managed to persuade untold thousands to abandon their existing beliefs and tag along with his, does not ring true, either historically or even according to common sense.

The bulk of the content ascribed to Paul, as Rook has pointed out before, does however tend to the euphemistic interpretation - a clue to the fact, if the antiquity of Paul's letters has been genuinely gauged, that the foundations on which the Jesus character myth has been built are seriously unhistoric. If the church in its early days had bitten the bullet and admitted that it had no evidence for Jesus's existence but didn't require it as Paul's assertion that Jesus as a deity was what mattered, then it might yet have survived as a mystical faith, though without much of the ingredients that made it subsequently appealing to the powers that be and promoted it to a political power in its own right. Once that status had been achieved however, there was not only to be no turning back but further introspection on the matter was actively discouraged and even punished.

Hence the official stand now that Jesus existed, Paul was one man, and the dichotomies (which could never be adequately disguised theologically) are still presenting interpretational problems even to atheists.

It's one of those areas where the subscribers to the faith have to fall back on the "it was so because it says it was so" argument, and as such disqualifies both it and them from serious historical discussion.

I wouldn't worry too much about it, if I were you. It's their lie - and they're the ones who have to swallow it. To a rational person it's just one more example of the tangled web of self-inflicted deceit they've been spinning for so long now that there's no longer a way out for them.