First, Jesus and his resurrection is central to Paul's teachings, not an optional addon restricted to a few bits of text. Second, Paul is much more doctrinaire than Jesus. And third, parable-based teaching is probably not an ideal form for transmitting doctrine because previous writings weren't doctrinaire enough, right?
That Paul does not encompass the whole of later writing is far from surprising. Making a new religion is hard and thirsty work, and you don't know what will be needed until you have got congregations and sees together, and seen what would need shoring up.
I have also seen how the whole "redeeming original sin" rationale for the resurrection stunt was invented maybe centuries later, and that various sects had numerous other theories about it, until it was recognized that the question was causing too much dissension, and one theory had to be picked to rally around.
I get that people can be upset at discussion of possible ahistoricity of a Jesus figure. I can't see how anybody who has faith could be upset about it, though; to be upset about it, it seems to me you would have to have doubts yourself, and fear that discussion might turn up more facts that would cause you even more doubt.
In any case, citations of documentary evidence all of which was in the possession of the Church for millennia, and which it generally would have had to take initiative to transcribe before its paper rotted and crumbled, cannot establish any objective authority. The Church is the prototypical Interested Party. Certainly we have copious examples of forgery both early and late, so we need more than ordinary attestation to establish facts.
If the only motive you can attribute to your ideological opponents is one that confirms your views and would be embarrassing to them (e.g., “religious people don’t actually believe what they say they believe”), it is worth considering the possibility that you haven’t actually made a sincere effort to understand their views.
But they are not really participating in the discussion, which is about facts.
However, I have just read a fair bit of Tim O'Neill's writing, and recognize I will need to read more deeply to be able to hold a non-laughable opinion.
The Pauline epistles are indeed though usually cited as the works in the New Testament that were the earliest written down, but there's plenty of reason to doubt the academic consensus, which has shifted over time, and like all historical subjects, somewhat subject to fads. (After all, you can't gain notoriety or publish a new paper that simply says "yeah, what's written is likely true, or the closest approximation to the truth we're likely to ever have, and the people who came before me were right.)
Take the Gospel of Mark, usually cited as the earliest gospel. One of the strongest held reasons that it's believed to have been written after 70 AD is because Jesus prophesies what sounds like the Siege of Jerusalem. That's it. It certainly doesn't seem crazy even from a one hundred percent secular worldview that Jesus correctly or even accidentally predicted the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans via one hundred percent natural means, given the contemporary political situation. If anything, you can understand how the 1 of 100 prophets who completely by chance made an accurate prediction would become more popular afterward.
Or consider the gospel of John - one of the strongest held arguments against Johannine authorship is about the only biographical information we know about him is that he's a fisherman, and the author of John sounds like an intelligent Greek writer. That's it. I don't think it's radically implausible that he may have been employed at the time as a fisherman, and still had an educated background. Scholars usually call it "anonymous", even though the author clearly focuses on John and refers to him in a special way..and the ends the book by claiming that this is the disciple which testifies these things, and wrote these things. He also repeatedly humblebrags that John beat Peter in race...the kind of detail that doesn't seem like a religious community would find worth highlighting.
It's also not surprising that different accounts of something that occurred over a long timespan contain differences or highlight different things. You see this all the time from eyewitnesses today and throughout history. I was just reading the Landmark Edition of Anabasis that just came out, and there's a whole appendix about how Xenophon and Cyrus's doctor narrate a battle differently and make different claims about how Cyrus was wounded. But they were both eyewitnesses, or the closest to it you could ever hope to get for an event that happened 2500 years ago.
…but uh, there’s also no record of what happened to Caiaphas in the gospels. Presumably he didn’t meet a grisly fate either, and he’s certainly blamed by the gospels much more than Pilate.
You can do anything reasoning backwards from the desired conclusions, and that’s what a lot of historiography is.
But a need for a historical Jesus, and accompanying apostolic drama, in order to support your spiritual doctrine is hard to understand. Either it's right or it's wrong, either you have faith or you don't, whether it was written down right then or only centuries later.
I love that book but can’t recommend it to non nerds because it doesn’t flow quite right for a modern book. Education of Cyrus similarly. I LOVE these books but they take a little patience. Ironically, the Socratic Dialogues of Xenophon read easier than Plato’s.
Now, Golden Ass (Apuleius- trans. Robert Graves) reads like a modern book. Amazing.
The Landmark Edition from what I’ve skimmed through of the actual translation looks like the usual quality fare - I always recommend them, though I was a little disappointed with their Gallic Wars; Caesar is made a little too informal, I wish they had just used an existing translation.
I do need to get to the Golden Ass, thanks for the reminder, and that’ll be the translation I go for based on your recommendation. :)