Hello Mad. How's the chest infection? I do worry about you a little bit when I notice you're not on the boards that much :)
OK. Paul.
Well....hmmmm.
I suspect you'd write it off in similar terms to the way you treat Pliny et al
This is a trifle unfair I think because you're not taking into account that this is a discussion about historical evidence and on this basis, I have no option but to write off a source that's writing 100 years after the events and doesn't tell us anything about Jesus anyway - only Christians.
Pliny, Tacitus and Josephus merely confirm the existence of early Christians - nothing that we don't already know from Paul. If this was a debate about whether early Christians existed, then sure - I'd accept them as sources. But it's not.
And if we then go on to say.....well, if early Christians existed, then Jesus logically must have done too, then we're stuck in the unfortunate position of having to believe that Mithras, Ra & Zeus must have existed, since their followers prove it too. Clearly, neither of us follows that logic for any other god, so why should we for Jesus?
(Tacitus, incidentally, references an event that doesn't hold up historically. There was a fire in Rome, but almost certainly not caused by Nero. So, the idea that Nero deliberately deflected blame from himself by blaming Christians is immediately shaky - throwing the whole source into doubt).
The problem with Paul is not really what he does say, but more what he doesn't. Yes, he's our earliest source and SHOULD tell us an awful lot, but quite remarkably fails to.
The one thing that would make Christianity unique from all other cults and religions of the time was that Jesus lived and died as a man on Earth. This is the single most important fact about him - and everything Christianity stands for follows from it. He lived as a man, sacrificed his life and took the worlds sins upon his shoulders. This is utterly fundamental to Christianity, which means that the resurrection is too.
So where is a) the evidence that Paul was passing on this information to early Christians and b) the evidence that they were responding to it?
Human beings have been remarkably consistent in their behaviour over the years. If something is supposed to have happened in a particular place, you go and visit that place. (Look at Lourdes, look at Graceland, look at anywhere actually). This complete and total lack of apparent interest in seeing the stable Jesus was born in, the tomb that was found to be empty, the site of the crucifixion, tracking down disciples and family members to talk to is hard to explain. Where is the reverence for holy places?
Nowhere, absolutely nowhere, in the vast historical record of the times do we get the faintest indication that Christians were undertaking pilgrimages or journeying to Nazareth or Bethlehem because of Jesus. It's conceivable that, at this point, people who'd known an earthly Jesus would have still been alive - was anyone not wanting to talk to them?
When Pliny the Elder died (not regarded by anyone as divine, merely a great thinker) his nephew (the aforementioned Pliny the Younger) received a mammoth amount of letters wanting to know all about him, what he said or thought about stuff and so on. Interested people wanted to communicate with those who had known him, visit his home town, hear about the circumstances of his death and so on.
Is there any evidence that this kind of interest was being displayed in, not just a great thinker, a divine being? God himself? No. Not a sausage. To this day, we're not even clear where Nazareth actually was - or the tomb, or the site of the crucifixion. Early Christians should have sorted that out for us by establishing it as a holy site. They didn't. Why ever not?
So, it's not really enough to say, "Well, Paul didn't need to talk about that stuff in his letters" or "He did, but we've lost the letters" because we have no evidence from the actions or response of others that he was passing on this kind of information at all. And if he wasn't - why not? It's the most important fact about Jesus there is.
Then when we look closely at what Paul actually said, it doesn't look as if he thinks Jesus existed as a man at all. He seems to have considered that the few facts he does pass on (the crucifixion and resurrection) happened in a higher plane of existence altogether - which would be 100% typical of how people generally did regard events in the lives of their gods. They believed (virtually all of them) that there were various levels of existence, and Earth was just one.
That's the Paul problem for me :)