Regarding Jesus

[Confused Ape]

We do, you've cracked the vampire mystery? I wasn't aware. We actually -don't- know why people started telling vampire stories...even though we do know why this particular vampire story was told the way it was.

I meant we know who wrote the Dracula novel and why he wrote it.

Or some non-existent messiah as a character in a narrative.

Yes, he could have been non-existent but there's still the question of who wrote the narrative and why. We'll never know so we can only speculate.

Since grief hallucinations are not needed to explain either Paul Bunyon or Jesus - I can;t fathom why it gets mentioned again - except out of your insistence to plug it in.

The phenomenon of grief hallucinations is the most mundane explanation I can think of for a story about a dead guy being resurrected to get started. 21st century people believe in all kinds of odd things and here's another one - Dead Celebrities Crazy People Insist Are Still Alive But in Hiding

A related idea to this is that Jesus survived the crucifixion and lived the rest of his life in India or France.

I have to point out here that these explanations that absolutely insist upon some "jesus" - all amount to absolutely shitting on whomever the author of these tales may be individually or collectively.

So why don't you come up with a suggestion as to why somebody decided to start a story about a resurrected messiah in Palestine and why it spread through the Roman Empire? There doesn't have to be a real man behind the Jesus myth but there's still got to be some reason for how the story got started.

Well it's not implausible that there was a cult leader around this time about whom the myths arose.

Implausible? No. But it reeks of special pleading since the jesus freaks will deny with their last breath that there is any historical basis for any other gods created by the human imagination.

I said the cult leader could have been someone that Paul of Tarsus was based on. On the other hand, the new religion could have developed from travellers' tales and Marcion invented Paul.

Why is it special pleading? As I said, there were many people around this time who made apocoloypic prophesies who had cults spring up around them. This is just the one that got lucky.

Because they will insist that Osiris, Horus, Hathor, Ishtar, Zeus, Odin, Quetzlcoatl, Shiva, Tammuz, etc are just myths.

But their JESUS? Fuck NO! He's the real deal.

Possible. Highly improbable. More likely jesus is simply bullshit like the rest of them.

The Jesus as portrayed in the Bible is as much bullshit as all the other deities humans have worshipped. I see that Bart Erhman has written a new book about it.

How Jesus Became God - The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee

A master explainer of Christian history, texts, and traditions, Ehrman reveals how an apocalyptic prophet from the backwaters of rural Galilee crucified for crimes against the state came to be thought of as equal with the one God Almighty, Creator of all things. But how did he move from being a Jewish prophet to being God? In a book that took eight years to research and write, Ehrman sketches Jesus’s transformation from a human prophet to the Son of God exalted to divine status at his resurrection. Only when some of Jesus’s followers had visions of him after his death—alive again—did anyone come to think that he, the prophet from Galilee, had become God. And what they meant by that was not at all what people mean today.

Even if this is true and could be proved the Jesus freaks would still reject it.

PS: BE is talking about followers having visions of Jesus after his death so my idea of grief hallucinations isn't unique.