http://www.mythicistpapers.com/2022/01/ ... -and-paul/
What is "proto-catholic" in Paul is clearly the enphasis on the crucifixion of Jesus.
The suspicion is great that a such emphasis is polemically designed to confute the Christians who denied that Jesus was crucified.
So Mark, where the Messianic Secret, docet Dykstra, is revealed by the centurion, makes the same point: the true Jesus Christ died on the cross. Here I can add the Stahl/Couchoud's genial exegesis: the false Christ, the Christ of the heretics, didn't die on the cross, he escaped shamefully, as "Barabbas".
Assuming the premise that the epistles are designed to confute the deniers of the crucified Christ, i.e. Docetists (not only anti-demiurgist Docetists but also Jewish Docetists), then what both (authors of the epistles and their enemies) shared? was it the belief that Jesus was connected originally, beyond if apparently or really, with the crucifixio? Or was the crucifixion the apt form of death who was able "to fix" the spiritual Jesus in the prison of the flesh?
The idea of the crucifixion as chaining to flesh is suggestive and is found in Philo.
One may imagine the early proto-catholics who thought in their mind: "if we introduce the idea that a pure spirit was crucified, then those there out can't more claim that it was a pure spirit, since only carnal people can be crucified".
The crucifixion was designed to work just as the eucharist: to prove that Jesus was carnal and not a pure spirit.
The adorers of the Jesus-pure-Spirit reacted to the news of a crucified Jesus by claiming the obvious, for them: the pure spirit only appeared to be crucified.
From the other hand, it is curious that the docetism can be seen as mythicist evidence or as historicist evidence.
- Reinach persuaded me that docetism was an apology against early anti-Christian mythicists;
- Turone persuaded me that the docetism was an early form of apology against Pagans who accused Jesus of sedition.
So Salm:
The Gospels-Epistles sequence is contrary to, say, the one proposed in Tom Dykstra’s insightful book, Mark: Canonizer of Paul (reviewed on this website here). Dykstra concludes (p. 19): “For Mark, what is uniquely significant about Jesus is not his teaching but his passion, crucifixion, and resurrection.” That is, of course, totally Pauline. Perhaps the best way to view the gospels and epistles is not the one before the other, but both corpora in tandem: they arose more or less together in the later second century, working ‘off one another,’ as it were.
In any case, it appears to me that the Pauline corpus fits neatly into the “Watch and Wait” period 150–200 CE. Like Ad Autolycum, the epistles avoid direct mention of Jesus of Nazareth and speak eloquently of the spiritual Jesus of old. They emphasize in first place the “cross of Christ” and thus implicitly betray knowledge of the (forthcoming) figure Jesus of Nazareth.
(my bold)