If Paul contradicts what Jesus said, I believe it is false. If Paul says things that contradict what I believe as a Baha'i, I believe those things are false.
You're simply saying that you don't consider the words attributed to Paul to be reliable. If they agree with Jesus, you think he's correct. If they disagree with Jesus, you think they're incorrect.
You said that faith is not a pathway to the truth but that is an opinion you hold on faith.
Paths constrain and guide our choices to guarantee arriving at the desired destination. A path to truth takes one to truth every time like a road takes one to wherever the road leads every time.
Faith is more likely to generate false and unfalsifiable beliefs than knowledge simply because there are more of the latter than correct ideas.
Here's a thought experiment for you. Choose an idea that you know is incorrect. If it can be believed by faith and it can, whatever it is - then faith is not a path to knowledge:
“If somewhere in the Bible I were to find a passage that said 2 + 2 = 5, I wouldn't question what I am reading in the Bible. I would believe it, accept it as true, and do my best to work it out and understand it."- Pastor Peter laRuffa
So countless alledged sightings of a Rock star you want to compare with the One
Yes. It's a nice illustration of the same phenomenon. Bigfoot, too.
Believers seem to think that comparing things to their god if off limits even if everything else is identical between the two except that one is called a god and the other something else. Maybe for them if that's what they've been taught, but not for others. Unsupported claims that involve seeing the dead are all equivalent in the sense that they shouldn't be believed.
The First Corinthian letter was written before the Gospels. In that letter Paul mentions that there were 500 people who saw Jesus after His resurrection. He said most of them were still alive. It was a bold thing to write seeing that those who were still alive could easily refute Paul that they DID NOT see Jesus. You do not have to take this as sacred text. You can take it as historical document. Five hundred people could not have the same hallucination simultaneously.
But one man could easily have made up the story of there being witnesses to a resurrection, which is much more likely than an actual resurrection. That doesn't describe a historical document. It describes mythology.
Here's some evidence you can refute. For a thousand years or more the Jerusalem Jews held the seventh day Sabbath as the most important day of worship. In your next post explain why within is few weeks thousands of Jerusalem Jews suddenly change to regard the 8th day - the first day of the week as of greater importance. They called it "The Lord's Day". Thousands began abruptly to gather from house-to-house commemorating the day after the Sabbath when Jesus of Nazareth rose
from the dead. What is you explanation for the sudden cataclysmic cultural shift of the ancient tradition? I say it's reasonable evidence of a miracle having taken place- Jesus rising from the dead.
Cataclysmic? Changing the Sabbath from one day of the week to another was cataclysmic? Life must have been much harder in those days for something so easy to do to have disrupted their lives.
And you say that doing so is evidence for a miracle? First, you believe a resurrection occurred based in the thirdhand hearsay of anonymous sources, and now you believe miracles occurred because the day of rest of people was changed. If a restaurant just changed its day of rest (the day it's closed) from one weekday to another, would that also be cataclysmic and evidence of a miracle to you? I'd answer no to both of those.
Why didn't the Romans or the Jews simply produce the corpse of Jesus and nip it in the bud? ... The movement could have been EASILY extinguished by either the Romans (who had cause) or the religious Jewish power structure (who had cause) to simply parade the corpse of Jesus around.
It was about two decades after the crucifixion allegedly occurred before there were claims of crucifixion. Nobody would be expecting to see a body. From AI:
"The earliest written accounts of Jesus’ resurrection can be found in Paul's letters, notably 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, which dates to approximately 53-54 AD."
Are you a mythicist? Like - "No such person as Jesus ever lived" mythicist?
It doesn't matter how much of the story of Jesus was historical if the magic wasn't, and there is no good reason to believe any of that. Without the magic, it's an ordinary story of an ordinary man living the life of a religious missionary of sorts. Thousands of people have and even today do live such lives.