Milestones in the Quest for the Historical Jesus

This is a the new heretics view.

I consider myself to be one on the outskirts. More a mostly skeptical Universalist.

Saul who became Paul is very bad and Jesus seems a religious fanatic who thought he could bring on the End Times. James the Just, the brother of Jesus, seems the real leader and hero. When Jerusalem and most of Israel was destroyed only the Jewish communities outside survived and the Pauline Christianity community in Rome eventually became the most powerful and wrote the Bible, they also received the authority to destroy books that they did not support throughout the Empire. Jesus did not talk about atonement, that innovation came from Paul of Tarsus. It is to Paul that Christianity should trace its roots. The origins of Christianity as we know it came, not from Jesus, but from Paul.

The New Testament are letters that often chronicle the disputes between the Family of Jesus Church and Paul. The mysticism and miracles that are in the New Testament are superstitions that were copied down. A number of the Dead Sea Scrolls are from the first century and recount the struggles of the early church against "the liar" we now know as Paul.

Some of this is summarized here.