It is seriously against the odds that someone could undergo all those tortures, and yet stand up again (I'm sure I would respond by lying down dead), but there is nothing about impossible about it. Faith healing is not understood, but people of strong will do often survive conditions which the doctors pronounce fatal. People back then did not know much about the border between "alive" and "dead": of course there was no EEG to tell us whether the brain stopped; we are told that Jesus gave out the classic "last breath" or "death rattle" but cessation of breathing is not always death; they did not check the pulse because nobody knew to do that in those days, but the fact that blood still flowed when he was spear-stuck suggests that his heart was still beating.
According to Josephus, there was no different ways for the Romans to crucify criminals. The steps were the same for everyone from the scourge all the way to the actual crucifixion. Then, that it was not uncommon for crucifieds to linger on their crosses, passing out and back for up to three and four days, till death eventually cought up with them. Jesus was removed from his after only a few hours. This is evidence enough that he could have survived the cross. And, as we know by now, there was no spear-piercing, since it was not a Roman policy.
This is the reverse of the truth. In 1st Corinthians, Paul argues against the notion that Jesus resurrected in a body of "flesh", maintaining instead that the risen Jesus was some kind of "glorified" body made of some kind of spirit-stuff. Paul had "received" from the disciples at Jerusalem the story of Jesus rising from the dead, but wants his own purely visionary experience of the risen Christ to be the same as what the disciples experienced, so that he has equal authority to them; it was the people who had actually met Jesus who insisted that he rose in a purely corporeal fashion.
Glorified body! Spirit-stuff that eats and drinks, and digests food, and goes to the bathroom! So much for spirits to be doing after resurrection. And Paul never received anything from the Apostles in Jerusalem as his gospel was concerned. He declared himself that he had not gone up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before him. (Gal. 1:11,12,17,18) And this, he declared after three years that he was preaching his peculiar gospel.
The epistles to Timothy and Titus, called the "Pastorals", are rejected by non-fundamentalist scholars. They appear late (not mentioned by any early authors, or found in Marcion's collection of Pauline epistles), are different in style and dialect from Paul's genuine epistles, and seem to refer to a more structured church than is likely to have existed that early. There have been counter-arguments: that private letters were not at first generally known, unlike those addressed to churches; and that "Paul after dark" may have had a less formal style than the polished writing in letters intended for publication. A compromise suggested by Meyer, which I somewhat like, is that there were such letters, which were saved as precious relics, but had fallen to pieces by the time they were published; so some sentences here and there are from Paul, but the bulk of the text has been filled in by someone writing "what Paul ought to have said" (a parallel case is the correspondence between Paul and Seneca in Rome: the family of Seneca came out with these saved letters hundreds of years later, but only small sections of the text are thought to be genuine). But we cannot lean too hard on anything in the Pastorals with any confidence that Paul actually wrote it. What is most likely to be genuine are the trivial bits like "I left my cloak behind at Troas, can you retrieve it?" that nobody would have had a motive to make up (ancient forgers did not have much sense of creating this kind of detail for verisimilitude); if we had the whole letters intact, it might be that it was all "Joanna's uncle recently died so why don't you pay her a condolence call? And Trophimus has his bunions again, can you get some of that lotion from Alexandria for him?" and so on and so on.
The truth, according to the NT, is that Paul identifies himself as the one who wrote those epistles addressed to Timothy, whom he confessed his famous personal secret that it was all according to his gospel that Jesus was the Messiah and that he had resurrected. (II Tim. 2:8) It means that there was another gospel being preached, at the same time, which, doubtless was the gospel of the Apostles of Jesus, in whose agenda those Pauline fabrications were not mentioned about Jesus. That's the gospel Paul would refer to, in a pejorative manner, as the other gospel. (Gal. 1:8)
Ben
(Someone moving at near light speed would experience one day's passage of time, whereas someone moving somewhat slower would experience much more time during the same period.)
