If you are amazed at my questions, I am afraid that you are so confined to your particular mindset that it will be difficult for you to relate to Doherty's Jesus Puzzle.

Paul's letters are consistent with the theory that he was originally a Jewish preacher who spoke of a spiritual savior and had conflicts with more established Jewish leaders. Christianity evolved from these Jewish factions and, in the second century, historicized thaat spiritual savior, inventing a first century history for itself. People do reinvent and reinterpret history all the time - look at how David Barton has spread falsehoods about American history which are fervently believed by many Americans.

The debates with the Jews that you speak about happened in the second century or later, and these Jews so no reason to challenge the invented history.

Paul speaks of the Pillars of the Church of Jerusalem without tying any of them to a Jesus of Nazareth. He does call James the Brother of the Lord, but not the brother of Jesus, and is quite emphatic about getting his gospel directly from the Lord, not from any man.

It is only because you have read the gospels, written decades later, that you connect Cephas of the Pillars with the Peter who was a disciple of Jesus of Nazareth in that story, or James the powerful head of this triumvirate with the insignificant James of the gospel stories, Jesus' brother who didn't get it. These look like different people, and Paul does not show them the deference you would expect if they had actually known his savior.

Paul can speak of "Jesus crucified" wherever or whenever Jesus was crucified - it could have been in a Roman play, or 100 years B.C. We don't know what his readers understood by that.

"The "Lord" being discussed in 1 Corinthians is the Lord Jesus Chrsit [sic] who is also said to take on flesh (as 1 Cor 1 also shows). If not Jesus of Nazareth, then who else?"

How about the Lord God? Paul's usage is often ambiguous, as it would be if his letters were originally Jewish and later edited by Marcionite and orthodox Christians who just felt the need to explain what he really meant.

I don't think that it would be at all useful for you to debate Doherty on this issue. Doherty bases his arguments on the consensus of liberal scholarship, which does not regard the gospels as historical, and you seem to reject that scholarly consensus.