text: That is a lie. Since I think it's impossible to know what Jesus actually thought about his self-identity I would never say such a thing. At best one can speculate on the basis of the various profiles of Jesus described by the evangelists decades after the Crucifixion. Of course, St. Paul, whose letters predate the gospels, never met Jesus and describes him only as an "appearance."
  
  You are simply wrong about the Pauline epistles.
  
  The Church doesn't circumscribe these matters. The scholarly discipline of NT historical and text critical studies does the heavy lifting to approximate the provenance of the NT texts. It's telling that you simply switch off at the boundaries of church orthodoxy. If there's anything that will continue to undermine the Catholic Church, it's this stifling attitude toward intellectual inquiry and the search for truth and accuracy.