>>17943963
There are sparse statements that might be taken as references to a historical Jesus, e.g. some guy named James being referred to as "the brother of the Lord" or "For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread..." or references to Jesus being of the seed of David, having a mother, etc. but Richard Carrier argues (successfully imo) that all such references are ambiguous. E.g. when Paul talks about brothers, the vast majority of the time he means it in a cultuc sense, so that all believers are brothers and sisters of the Lord, and when IIRC a few times when he means to refer to a biological relationship he does so explicitly, saying "brothers according to the flesh." Or in the case of "On the night Jesus was betrayed," the word translated as "betrayed" means "handed over," "delivered up," or "surrendered" with "betrayed" as a secondary possible meaning, and so it can be read as (IIRC) God doing the handing over rather than a human Judas.
And Carrier argues that the earliest gospel we have, Mark, is 1. very much a literary construction, and 2. made use of, among other things, Paul's writings, so any apparent correlation between Jesus and Paul could actually be be going from Paul to Jesus rather than from Jesus to Paul. And given that Paul is supposed to have only known Jesus from visions and never unambiguously justifies anything he says on the basis that a historical Jesus said them first, those overlaps maybe seem more natural under the assumption of backward causation.
