Any Evidence For A Historical Jesus?

[King_Charles]

...people deciding to start a cult on somebody who didn't even exist

It's a crazy thought isn't it? The thing is that Christianity had it pretty easy given that Zeus/Heracles (another fellow 'Son of God' that never existed) was already fresh in the Greek's minds.

If Christianity was 100% original then maybe the target audience would have rejected it completely.

Well it deffo wasn't original. The messiah had been predicted by the Jews for hundreds of years before Jesus came along. This can lend force to the argument that Jesus was just a guy that happened galvanize the latent religious and revolutionary fervor in Judea at the time. (You know the Monty python gag about Judean people's front/People's front of Judea - well they know their history, Josephus gives an account of three Jewish factions who were fighting each other in a civil war while the Romans were actually laying siege to Jerusalem, a few decades after the death of Christ.)

Or Christians might argue that the fact that Jesus fulfilled the prophecies points to him being the messiah. I'm not gonna insult your intellect by pointing out that this is a particularly weak argument, considering Jesus and certainly the authors of the synoptic gospels knew their Torah backwards...

You actually might want to check out mithras: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithraic_mysteries a religion that was basically coterminous with early Christianity that went on similar lines. There was also the cult of Isis that also dealt with the theme of resurrection and was, like Christianity, very popular among the Roman masses, and is often seen as a precursor for the madonna cult of the Christian era.

And don't let's get started on the possible Gnostic/Zoroastrian influence...