In On the Historicity of Jesus Richard Carrier lays out the "weirdness" of Paul's silence:
Glad to answer Tacitus, the younger Pliny wrote him a letter containing an extensive eyewitness account of all he saw and knew about his father's death, in around 1,500 words. For comparison, Paul's letter to the Galatians, one of his shortest, contains around 3,000 words; Romans, nearly 10,000 (although either or both may be a pastiche of what had previously been several shorter letters). Overall we have around 20,000 words from Paul. But in Pliny's mere 1,500 words we learn that his father died from respiratory failure after breathing the ashfall of Mount Vesuvius in his attempt to investigate the disaster and rescue survivors as commander of the Roman naval fleet stationed nearby. Pliny relates as much detail as he was witness to and those present informed him of. Pliny's response peaked Tacitus's curiosity and questions even more, and he wrote again, asking what the younger Pliny himself did in the days immediately following that tragedy. Pliny again obliged him with an account of that in a following letter. As Pliny says, 'the letter which you asked me to write on my uncle's death has made you eager to hear about the terrors and also the hazards I had to face' afterward.
This is the kind of exchange of letters we should expect to have from the earliest Christians. Not necessarily in every respect, but surely something like it. Curiosity, the burning desire to know, to have firsthand accounts, to have specific questions answered and desires for knowledge satisfied, would dominate every congregation under Paul and beyond, most especially in respect to the Son of God and Savior of the Universe whose deeds and speeches and death were (for them) the most important in all of history. The same burning desires exhibited by Tacitus and eagerly satisfied by Pliny would have been multiplied a hundredfold in the two decades of Paul's mission, given the number of Christians and distant churches there were by then, spanning three continents. For not even one person to have ever exhibited this interest in writing nor for any to have so satisfied it is bizarre. Saying this all went on in person is simply insufficient to answer the point: if everything was being resolved in person, Paul would never have written a single letter; nor would his congregations have so often written him letters requesting he write to satisfy their questions--which for some reason always concerned only doctrine and rules of conduct, never the far more interesting subject of how the Son of God lived and died. On the other matters Paul was compelled to write tens of thousands of words. If he had to write so much on those issues, how is it possible no one ever asked for or wrote even one word on the more obvious and burning issues of the facts of Jesus' life and death?
This oddity is all the greater given that there were countless moral and doctrinal disputes arising in these congregations (the very reason Paul wrote such long and detailed letters), which must necessarily have rested on many questions that the actual facts of Jesus' words, life and death would have addressed, answered or pertained to. Such facts would thus necessarily become points of query, debate and contention. Which in turn would have involved eyewitnesses weighing in, either directly (writing letters themselves), indirectly (by dictating letters through hired scribes, which were abundantly available for just that purpose; there were surely even scribes within Christian congregations willing to volunteer), or by proxy (communicating with educated leaders like Paul, who would then relay what they learned). I've made this point already (as in Chapter 8, §4). But it bears repeating here because it proves by contrast how very bizarre the letters of Paul actually are.
Carrier also writes in a blog-post:
https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/12220
In my book On the Historicity of Jesus, I covered pretty much every possible verse in the Epistles that any expert has ever tried to claim proves Jesus really lived. You can check yourself: it has a complete scripture index (pp. 661-71). And Chapter 11 rakes the whole thing over with a fine toothed comb (pp. 510-95). The big ones of course get the most attention (“Paul says Jesus was made of sperm!” “Paul says Jesus had a mom!” “Paul says he met Jesus’s brother!” “Paul says Jesus was buried!” “Paul says the Jews killed him!” “Paul says Jesus broke bread one night!” Etc.). When you look at them without the lens of fundamentalist interpretation, those verses don’t really say what people think. Or at best we honestly can’t tell if they do. And that’s weird....
Always the problem is that people who want the Epistles to attest a historical Jesus have to import meanings to it from the Gospels. But the Gospels were written decades later and wholly unknown to Paul—indeed, the Gospels say many things that were clearly not even being preached in Paul’s day. And this is the wrong way to read evidence. If you want to test two competing theories against each other, you have to do it in a logically valid way, which means first assuming each theory is true and then asking if the evidence makes sense, if it matches what we expect (or not), on that theory—and how much it does (see OHJ, pp. 513-14). And when we do that, we have to take into account how background facts affect our expectations in both cases (e.g. pretty much all evidence against historicity was destroyed: OHJ, pp. 275-77, 279-80, 349-56; so we can’t expect explicit evidence to survive—for instance, if Paul ever outright said Jesus died in the sky, that verse certainly would have been expunged, as we know whole letters of his were: OHJ, pp. 280, 511, 582, etc.).
Accordingly, you have to ask, “if Paul was really writing about a cosmically crucified and buried archangel, and all his explicit statements to that effect were expunged, what would we expect to find his Epistles saying today?” Rather than just assuming the Gospels are all accurate histories or even have any real sources whatever. You have to assume they don’t. And then ask how well the evidence of the Epistles fits expectation. And you’ll find the answer is: pretty much exactly (I allow some exceptions on the a fortiori side, but it turns out they aren’t strong enough to carry the case the other way: OHJ, pp. 592-95). Then you compare that result with the other: How well does that same evidence fit the expectation if there was a Jesus, and Paul wasn’t talking about a celestial one all that time? Not really all that well. And indeed, the more you assume in the Gospels is true, the less probable the contents of the Epistles become (e.g. see OHJ, pp. 354-55; p. 557 nn. 55 and 56; pp. 574-75, n. 82). Which is why only a theory of historicity that assumes the Gospels are almost entirely mythical has any chance of being true (OHJ, Ch. 2).
These two verses [discussed in Carrier's post] now exemplify the point: they barely even make sense on the fundamentalist assumption that the authors are referring to an earthly Jesus with them. They hardly are what we’d expect Paul or the Hebrews theologian to say if there was already a lore about Jesus having an actual mother named Mary or being tempted by Satan in the Jordanian desert. We wouldn’t expect this talk of Sarah and Hagar as allegorical mothers, or even a mention of Jesus being born of a mother at all—that’s not something you ever think to say of a human, any more than you’d take the trouble to mention they had skin.
We likewise wouldn’t expect such abstract talk of his being tempted to seize the powers of God and showing he resisted sin by not doing that. We’d sooner hear stories of actual earthly sins he was tempted by and resisted, verifying the fact being asserted (contrast, for instance, the method of argument in Hebrews 11 and 12: OHJ, pp. 550-52)—rather than being told what we know of all this comes from an analysis of scripture, instead of reminding us of things he told his disciples, or what the disciples saw. There aren’t even any disciples. In Hebrews and all the letters of Paul, “disciples” never appear. The word is unknown to them. The concept is likewise unknown to them—neither of whom mention anyone ever knowing Jesus before he died, much less having been hand-picked by him or witnessing his life or being the principal source of relaying his words.
By contrast, given the Doherty Thesis, and the conjoint fact of the suppression of all evidence too explicitly worded, these two verses are exactly the sort of thing we expect to find in Paul and Hebrews. Abstract references to Jesus’s cosmic temptation (reversing and thus undoing the myth of Satan), and speaking of mothers metaphorically rather than literally, meaning simply which world one is linked to (the earthly or the heavenly), using words for Jesus that mean manufacture rather than natural birth, and words for ourselves that mean natural birth rather than manufacture (compare Philippians 2:7 and Romans 1:3 and Galatians 4:4 with Galatians 4:23, 24, 29, etc.; see OHJ, pp. 575-76, 580-81). This is all just what we expect on minimal mythicism (OHJ, Ch. 3). Though not impossible, it’s still hardly what we expect on historicity.
And it’s the ratio between those two probabilities—the probability this is what we’d see in the Epistles today if minimal mythicism is true, compared to the probability this is what we’d see in them today if any form of historicity were true—that determines the effect this evidence (the surviving content of the Epistles) on the final probability that Jesus existed (see If You Learn Nothing Else). And here, the evidence remains the same as I found it in OHJ: either the evidence supports both equally (and thus supports neither), or it’s all leaning against historicity, not for it. Regardless of what the Gospels say.
