He he says he was a descendant of Abraham (Gal 3:16), of Israelites (Romans 9:4-5) and of Jesse (Romans 15:12). Paul says Jesus was born as a human, of a human mother and born a Jew (Galatians 4:4). But there are still elements in Paul’s seven undisputed letters that do not fit at all well with the Mythicist reading. This is made slightly easier for them by the fact that Paul, like the writers of similar epistles after him, seems little interested in the biography of Jesus and is more concerned with theological aspects of the Jesus story. In this way they explain how Paul could talk about Jesus doing all these very human and earthly sounding things while still claiming his letters as evidence for their supposed Mythic Jesus form of proto-Christianity. They claim that he saw Jesus as a purely celestial being one that takes on a fleshly form in the heavens and is crucified, died and rose from the dead there, without ever coming to earth. Most Jesus Mythicists, however, claim that Paul did not believe in an earthly, historical and human Jesus at all. This is uncontroversial and actually fairly unremarkable, given that while Paul seems to have understood Jesus to have also had a heavenly pre-existence (see Phil 2:5-7), he makes other references to Jesus as an earthly, historical human being (see Gal 4:4, 3:16, Rom 9:4-5 and 15:12).Īt least, this is unremarkable for most scholars. Since the “David” in question is the ancient king of Israel and Paul specifies Jesus’ descent from him “according to the flesh”, this seems to be a unequivocal indication that Paul believed Jesus was, at least in one respect, both a human and a descendant from a human ancestor. But it contains an element which is of particular interest to the issue of the historicity of Jesus.
This is a densely-packed statement and is clearly meant to be so. Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures, the gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles for the sake of his name, including yourselves who are called to belong to Jesus Christ. So it opens with an introduction that is something of a credal statement and an apologia:
It differs from most of his other surviving letters in that he was addressing a community he had not yet visited, rather than one he had founded or at least knew well personally. Sometime in the late 50s AD Paul wrote a letter to the Jesus Sect community in Rome.
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