So the fool Catholic apologist Giuseppe Ricciotti in his “Life of Jesus Christ”:
But even so thinned, this figure of Jesus always has against himself – as the Couchoud pointed out – the testimony of St. Paul, who not even twenty years after Jesus’ death makes this man a divine being, author of human redemption, of universal grace, of the Eucharist and the Christian mysteries of salvation; therefore, either the figure of Jesus outlined by Loisy is false, or the testimony of St. Paul is false. The Loisy has chosen, of course, the second alternative.
…
In the past he had admitted the substantial authenticity of the letters of St. Paul, assigning them to the period between the years 50 and 61; but now, in order to escape the aforementioned objection, he retains this assignment only in name, whereas in reality he abandons it, since by breaking down the individual letters into a great number of fragments he still attributes only a small part to St. Paul, and on the contrary he declares interpolated the most ample and above all more imposing fragments for his theory, attributing them to a “mystical gnosis” of the end of the I century. After long hesitations, also the annoying step in which St. Paul attributes to Jesus the institution of the Eucharist (1 Corinthians 11) is declared false and interpolated.
…
In the past he had admitted the substantial authenticity of the letters of St. Paul, assigning them to the period between the years 50 and 61; but now, in order to escape the aforementioned objection, he retains this assignment only in name, whereas in reality he abandons it, since by breaking down the individual letters into a great number of fragments he still attributes only a small part to St. Paul, and on the contrary he declares interpolated the most ample and above all more imposing fragments for his theory, attributing them to a “mystical gnosis” of the end of the I century. After long hesitations, also the annoying step in which St. Paul attributes to Jesus the institution of the Eucharist (1 Corinthians 11) is declared false and interpolated.
(page 219-220, my emphasis)
So Arthur Drews does the same point:
Either the Pauline Epistles are genuine, and in that case Jesus is not an historical personality; or he is an historical personality, and in that case the Pauline Epistles are not genuine, but written at a much later period.
https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wi ... /Section_3
Note that Ricciotti is 100% a pure apologist. He WANTS that a never-interpolated Paul has to raise a lot of contradictions with the historical Jesus (precisely the kind of contradictions seen today by Doherty, for example, and that Roger Parvus himself would see IF he considers genuine any portion of the epistles, in primis 1 Cor 2:6-11), so he can conclude that the historical Jesus is the same Catholic Christ.
Something as:
1) Jesus existed.
2) it is impossible for Paul talk about a cosmic Christ etc after so short time.
3) therefore: Jesus is really a historical and a divine being. Catholicism is true.
Clearly the Ricciotti's argument is a good example of hypocrisy. He uses mythicist arguments as "evidence" of the truth of the Christian religion.
I ask: really does a minimal Paul prove a historical Jesus?
Is not the silence about a historical Jesus in Paul so strong even under the hypothesis of a Paul strongly interpolated?