You Bastards!

You just have to read it: http://pages.ca.inter.net/~oblio/partone.htm

Especially the part about Paul's disinterest in visiting the site of the crucifixion, tomb, place of ascension, etc. Absolutely stunning. 40+ years of this gnawing feeling that something isn't right here. It's like the lights just came on. Here are some examples:

When Paul, in Romans 8:26, says that "we do not know how we are to pray," does this mean he is unaware that Jesus taught the Lord's Prayer to his disciples?

But the silence extends beyond individual pronouncements to Jesus' ministry as a whole, and it is nowhere more startling than in Romans 10. Paul is anxious to show that the Jews have no excuse for failing to believe in Christ and gaining salvation, for they have heard the good news about him from appointed messengers like Paul himself. And he contrasts the unresponsive Jews with the gentiles who welcomed it. But surely Paul has left out the glaringly obvious. For the Jews—or at least some of them—had supposedly rejected that message from the very lips of Jesus himself, whereas the gentiles had believed second-hand. In verse 18 Paul asks dramatically: "But can it be they never heard it (i.e., the message)?" How could he fail to highlight his countrymen's spurning of Jesus' very own person? Yet all he refers to are apostles like himself who have "preached to the ends of the earth."

Then in Romans 11, Paul goes on to compound this silence by describing the extent of Israel's rejection, wherein he quotes Elijah's words from 1 Kings about the Jews' alleged habit (a largely unfounded myth) of killing their own prophets. Yet Paul fails to add to this record the culminating atrocity of the killing of the Son of God himself.

Hebrews also contains (9:20f) a stunning silence on Jesus' establishment of the Christian Eucharist. The writer is comparing the old covenant with the new, but not even the quoted words of Moses at the former's inauguration: "this is the blood of the covenant which God has enjoined upon you," can entice him to mention that Jesus had established the new covenant at a Last Supper, using almost identical words, as Mark 14:24 and parallels record. He goes further in chapter 13 when he adamantly declares that Christians do not eat a sacrificial meal.

In short: The first Christian writings were the epistles of Paul, and Jesus the historical man from Nazareth, nor his acts nor his teachings are ever mentioned. This goes right on through all the other epistles, none ever referencing any details of his life as presented in the Gospels. Hello? I have always thought it was weird that the epistles were so different in that way, but kinda assumed that the writers figured the Gospels had covered it all and they had bigger fish to fry.... but the Gospels hadn't even been written!

Paul and Co. reworked Mithras into a Jewish Messiah, and dealt only with the mystical aspects. Others later fleshed out the Jesus myth. You fucking bastards.