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The hardest part about Christianity is that all of the evidence points to a Pharisee who never met Jesus exploiting his death and fashionable Jewish apocalypticism onto disaffected Romans which he felt compelled to do after hallucinating that he saw the heavenly Jesus alone in a cave somewhere. Do I believe his hallucination was a secret revelation given to him by the heavenly body of Jesus himself? No.
If a miracle happens somewhere, you've piqued my interest and I'd be curious to follow up on it. If it turns out the miracle was a rumor spread by a guy who saw it in a hallucinatory vision, I move on pretty quickly.
Saul the Pharisee was on the road in a group of his compatriots, on their way to go arrest some heretics, when he was (quite famously) blinded publicly by Jesus and sent to a Christian to be healed. Luke, Paul’s companion and archivist, wrote of it thrice in Acts. Now, whether it was:
it certainly wasn’t Saul alone in a cave somewhere getting a mystic vision from sensory deprivation, volcanic gases, or fermented elderberries.
Well he was "alone" in that he continually claims he received the vision alone, it was a direct experience with Christ that he didn't share with anyone else. I don't know why I remembered it as a cave, I may have just be confused on that.
You probably confused him with Mohammed.
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You'll have to flesh this out. Assuming you're talking about Paul as your pharisee, this is manifestly incorrect, if you think Galatians is Pauline (which all the scholars do, not just the Christian ones)—he explicitly refers to the other, earlier, apostles, who actually interacted with Jesus. Or do you really think only Paul really mattered in getting us Christianity?
He interacted with the other apostles but only a apparently few times and mostly seemed to be doing his own thing with the gentiles, and they eventually seemed to be very conflicted with him over retaining Jewish law etc. I think a lot of that gets papered over in the bible to make Paul look more broadly accepted and integrated them. But just looking at the history, the whole Jewish movement in Christianity got wiped out with the persecution of Jews in Rome, and all that appears left from the original Jesus movement is the Q source and the book of James, neither of which back Paul's claims of the heavenly Jesus or heavenly apocalypse.
Which is to say, all that's left from the original Jesus movement is certain moral teachings and miracles. If that's all Christianity was I could actually see myself engaging with it as a way of integrating with a positive moral community. But the heavenly Christ mythology which every Christian is expected to believe all comes from the one guy (and the direct followers of his school of thought) who never met Jesus in real life, and there's no way I'll ever be able to buy that.
It's not just Paul. Neither the synoptics nor the Johannine texts look the same as Paul's style and emphases. Paul doesn't talk about the kingdom of God the way you see in Mark (note, neither Q nor James).
Also, assuming Acts 15 has some basis in history, they ultimately settled on the same thing regarding Jewish practices. And I'll note that the Judaizers described in Galatians, Corinth, etc. do not incite Paul to write about differences in Christology or devotion to Christ, which seems fairly relevant in evaluating whether a "heavenly Christ" is uniquely Pauline.
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