Posted by:
forbiddencokedrinker
(
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Date: February 25, 2015 11:19PM
Proto-Christianity, that is, Christianity in its raw form, where they believed a Messiah had been born, died and resurrected for their sins, actually goes back a few hundred years before the common era. In the original version, Jesus was not a man who ever lived on the earth, but a god being, sometimes just an arch-angel, other times the son-of god, who lived and died in heaven. Heaven was believed to be the sky, and the place where Jesus was murdered, by demons in the original version, was believed to be just beneath the moon. His tomb was on the moon itself. This was the Jesus Christ that Paul believed in. None of his original letters spoke of a Jesus who lived on the earth, and the ones that did, have been shown to have been written by other people, sometime after Paul's death.
Paul was actually a super successful missionary, and his role was probably in getting this Jewish mystery religion main stream. Shortly after Paul's death though, mystery religions about gods who lived in the sky fell out of favor, and it became more popular to tell stories about gods who lived on earth, in real places, and interacted with real historical figures. The Jesus story was rewritten, and we know this by looking at contrast between earlier accounts of Jesus, and the ones that started appearing in the second century of the common era.
This is why the New Testament has a bunch of historical figures living in the wrong eras. King Herod, who ordered all the babies murdered (an event strangely missing from all historical records) and Pilot were several decades apart in their reigns, but both were notorious enough figures that authors felt compelled to add them. Kind of like that story about how Joseph Smith got saved by Mark Twain, when Mark Twain was a riverboat captain, despite the fact that Mark Twain was only a very small child at the time of Smith's death. It is also why Jesus does not show up in any reliable historical documents.
For references, please see this handy lecture by a noted scholar and professor who has studied the whole matter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwUZOZN-9dc