Christ Conspiracy_ The Greatest Story Ever Sold - Acharya S [21]
The Epistles
The various Pauline epistles contained in the New Testament form an important part of Christianity, yet these "earliest" of Christian texts never discuss a historical background of Jesus, even though Paul purportedly lived during and after Jesus's advent and surely would have known about his master's miraculous life. Instead, these letters deal with a spiritual construct found in various religions, sects, cults and mystery schools for hundreds to thousands of years prior to the Christian era. As Dujardin points out, the Pauline literature "does not refer to Pilate or the Romans, or Caiaphas, or the Sanhedrin, or Herod or Judas, or the holy women, or any person in the gospel account of the Passion, and that it also never makes any allusion to them; lastly, that it mentions absolutely none of the events of the Passion, either directly or by way of allusion."6
Mangasarian notes that Paul also never quotes from Jesus's purported sermons and speeches, parables and prayers, nor does he mention Jesus's supernatural birth or any of his alleged wonders and miracles, all of which would presumably be very important to Jesus's followers, had such exploits and sayings been known prior to Paul. Mangasarian then understandably asks:
Is it conceivable that a preacher of Jesus could go throughout the world to convert people to the teachings of Jesus, as Paul did, without ever quoting a single one of his sayings? Had Paul known that Jesus had preached a sermon, or formulated a prayer, or said many inspired things about the here and the hereafter, he could not have helped quoting, now and then, from the words of his master. If Christianity could have been established without a knowledge of the teachings of Jesus, why then, did Jesus come to teach, and why were his teachings preserved by divine inspiration?. . . If Paul knew of a miracle-working Jesus, one who could feed the multitude with a few loaves and fishes, who could command the grave to open, who could cast out devils, and cleanse the land of the foulest disease of leprosy, who could, and did, perform many other wonderful works to convince the unbelieving generation of his divinity-is it conceivable that either intentionally or inadvertently he would have never once referred to them in all his preaching?. . . The position, then, that there is not a single saying of Jesus in the gospels which is quoted by Paul in his many epistles is unassailable, and certainly fatal to the historicity of the gospel Jesus.
In fact, even though the "Lord's Prayer" is clearly spelled out in the gospels as being given directly from Jesus's mouth, Paul expresses that he does not know how to pray. Paul's Jesus is also very different from that of the gospels. As Wells says:
. . . these epistles are not merely astoundingly silent about the historical Jesus, but also that the Jesus of Paul's letters (the earliest of the NT epistles and hence the earliest extant Christian documents) is in some respects incompatible with the Jesus of the gospels; that neither Paul, nor those of his Christian predecessors whose views he assimilates into his letters, nor the Christian teachers he attacks in them, are concerned with such a person. ..7
So it appears that Paul, even though he speaks of "the gospel," had never heard of the canonical gospels or even an orally transmitted life of Christ. The few "historical" references to an actual life of Jesus cited in the epistles are demonstrably interpolations and forgeries, as are the epistles themselves, not having been written by the Pharisee/Roman "Paul" at all, as related by Wheless:
The entire "Pauline group" is the same forged class ... says E.B. [Encyclopedia Biblical . . . "With respect to the canonical Pauline Epistles, .... there are none of there by Paul; neither fourteen, nor thirteen, nor nine or eight, nor yet even the four so long 'universally' regarded as unassailable. They are all, without distinction, pseudographia (false-writings, forgeries)..." They are thus all uninspired anonymous church forgeries for Christ's