People seem to take a lot for granted about Jesus, assuming that we know things we really can't claim to know for sure. If you stop assuming that Christianity is true, though, a lot of what people believe about Jesus can't be assumed either. Then where are we?
A forum member writes:
My comments are loosely based of reading of the bible. First Jesus was a Jew. Second Nicodemus was a Pharisee. Third Jesus was crucified, which means he got bloody. it would appear that Jesus would not have been allowed to be put in Nicodemus' grave.
Flash forward to Paul. He stakes his life on the resurrection and is Jesus witness to thousands of people. He explains who Jesus is and he will carry on his tradition. The bible says Paul never met Jesus but he met Steven long enough to have him stoned. If this book is about Jews if two men are required for any legal witness. Would Paul be a witness to someone he never met?
A body not put in a grave would indeed be hard to be found. I never met Marilyn Monroe. I understand she is dead. If I am a credible witness as Paul I would need two things. First never to have met her. Check. I have to wait fifty years after his death to write about it. Help me, how long do I have to wait?
I believe Jesus lived. I believed Jesus died. Outside that I can't verify he went to hell for three days or much else.
Others on the forum pointed out, though, that if you really are going to apply skeptical principles consistently, even the idea that Jesus "lived" and "died" can't be taken for granted either:
I see no evidence whatsoever that Jesus existed at all. Ergo, I see no reason to believe that he either lived or died.
As for Paul, those writings presumably authentic to Paul predated the gospels by many years. Though the gospels are placed first in the New Testament, they were actually among the last, if not the last, things to be written.
There is little authentic to Paul that shows any connection to the gospels. According to Paul, Jesus was crucified and resurrected. In I Corinthians there is a reference to the Last Supper which was likely added into the epistle by some scribe much later and was not originally in the epistle (I Corinthians 11:23-26), or at least the part that references the gospel accounts. Even if that were original to the epistle, the gospels were written much later and could easily have based their Eucharist scenes on I Corinthians. Other than that, there is little to nothing in Paul that is shared with the gospels. Paul's epistles don't teach vast majority of the material that is in the gospel.
And, it was not Nicodemus' tomb, but that of Joseph of Arimathea.
There is no known eyewitness account of Jesus at all. Not a single contemporary account even so much as makes the slightest mention of him. All we have are myths written down generations later, many of which are clearly derived from much older pagan myths or are rewritten versions of materials in the Old Testament.
The only thing that makes the claim about Jesus "living" more plausible that Jesus' alleged resurrection is simply the fact that lots of people lived and died during this era and in this part of the world. The idea of an itinerant preacher saying some of the things attributed to Jesus isn't the least bit implausible. But would that really be "Jesus"?
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