St. Paul was martyred in the mid-A.D. 60s, and he wrote his letters in the 50s and 60s, making them very early sources about Jesus—much earlier, Mythicists say, than the Gospels.
Mythicists frequently state that if Jesus were a real, historical figure, St. Paul would tell us about his life; but he only speaks about Jesus as a heavenly individual. He doesn’t tell us stories about his life, give sayings of Jesus, or relate biographical facts about his life on earth. Consequently, Paul understood Jesus to be a purely heavenly being.
The first thing to say is that the claim about Paul’s epistles being earlier than the Gospels is overblown. We will argue in a future chapter that the Gospels also were written in the A.D. 50s and 60s, making them contemporary with the letters of Paul.
More fundamentally, the Mythicist is making an argument from silence—that, since Paul is silent about Jesus’ earthly life, Jesus must not have had an earthly life. But arguments from silence are weak. Just because someone is silent about something doesn’t mean that he doesn’t know about or believe it. When someone is writing a book, or a shorter work like a letter, he inevitably knows much more than he will say in that text.
Some years ago, I wrote a book called The Drama of Salvation, which was, unsurprisingly, about the Bible’s teaching on salvation. In it, I didn’t mention the atomic theory of matter, but that didn’t mean that I don’t know about or believe in atoms. I simply didn’t write about them because that wasn’t my purpose in the book. The only thing you could reasonably infer from my silence on atoms is that I didn’t think mentioning them would serve my purpose, not that I didn’t know about or believe in their existence.
This illustrates how arguments from silence only have value if it can be shown that a person would have had a special reason to mention a subject but still didn’t. Without that, an argument from silence is worthless, because without a special reason to mention a subject, an author likely won’t bring it up.
Paul did not have a special reason to go into detail about Jesus’ earthly life, because he was not writing a Gospel. He was writing letters to deal with situations in churches he was in contact with, to people who were already Christians and already knew the story of Jesus. There was no need for him to repeat that story in his letters.
Rather than looking to the past, in his letters Paul primarily looks to the present and future. He deals with present problems in the churches and how people can live in expectation of the future coming of Jesus.
Where is Jesus at the time Paul is writing? In heaven. That’s why Paul spends most of his time discussing Jesus as a heavenly figure. It’s natural he would focus on the heavenly Jesus, because that’s where Jesus was. Paul isn’t writing a Gospel to tell us about Jesus’ earthly life, which belonged to the past. Paul is trying to help people relate correctly to Jesus today, and so it’s no surprise that he doesn’t give a lot of biographical details about him. This argument from silence thus doesn’t work.
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