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Repurposing most of a comment from earlier in the day where someone asked about learning about the Jesus Myth theory that Jesus was originally a heavinly figure and only got turned into a guy with an earthly ministry decades later. This is well supported by the evidence in texts from the start of christianity (epistles, Dead Sea Scrolls).
The Jesus Puzzle, by Earl Doherty. He gets criticized because he’s not a trained scholar, but his work remains compelling and Robert M Price endorses him. I really enjoyed this one.
The Amazing Colossal Apostle - The Search for the Historical Paul, by Robert M Price. He’s a former Baptist minister with multiple degrees in the field, a true expert. He has a bunch of published YouTube interviews talking about these topics as well.
Quick warning: RMP is a Trump supporter. That makes sense. Ministers are rightwing. Coming from believing to realizing that the Bible is a collection of stories rather than history doesn’t necessarily change your politics. He mostly never mentions it, but it’s come out a couple of times in videos. Luckily, he doesn’t say anything further about it. The book is phenominal.
And, if you still want to consider Jeses to be a historical figure, I loved this controversial piece: The Passover Plot, by Hugh J. Schonfield. This book assumes that Jesus was a real apocalyptic Jew who truly believed that he was the messiah and who brilliantly engineered the conditions to fulfill prophecy. It’s a great read. If Jesus was a historical figure, this is the version of him that I think is most likely.
I am currently reading Marcion and the Dating of the Synoptic Gospels, by Markus Vinzent. I’m enjoying it a lot. Marcion was the first “heretic” for his view that Paul was the only apostle who understood the true message: that the creator god of the Jews was a lesser god, which is why there is evil in the world, and Jesus's god would adopt us.
Learning about the history and timeline of things sped my deconstruction considerably. Namely the Council of Nicea (sp?) where a group of men decided what to add or remove or change. The King James stuff. And I forget the names, but there were other places where they have found copies of the original or older manuscripts and it paints an interesting story that is NOT what is presented in present day as "the unchanging truth that has always been", but it paints more of a "men made all this up or there was some original story that maybe did happen and it has been changed a million times through the ages like a game of telephone to the point that not much remains of the truth." Sorta story.
Also, an epistle is the wife of an apostle. 🤣
Price is a really wacky guy, and even he will admit he’s very much on the fringe. I would suggest Dan McClellan or Bart Ehrman over him.
Price is fringe, but when you consider that orthodoxy erased mountains of dissenting texts, it's only fringe because all other ideas were erased for more than a thousand years.
Marcion, for example, had followers for at least three centuries. And the only examples we have of his writing is in quotes from church fathers arguing against him. There was a purge of unorthodox ideas, but his version of spirituality could have won out and then what is currently the norm would have been fringe. Christianity had a stranglehold over Europe and dictated its own history.