Shit. What The Hell. Jesus Never Existed

[Redbeard The Pink]

The point is that there is quite a bit written, and enough to establish reasonable certainty that a historical Jesus was - as all of the earliest writings related to Christianity, both religious and secular, attest - at the head and center of a budding theology. The mythicist interpretation is only equally as likely if you want to believe that there is a special criteria for reading ancient Christian writings and a separate criteria for reading everything else, rather than understanding the genre a particular work assumes and analysing it as the author intended it to be read, per his explicit words or the subtle clues experts are trained to detect. The original apostles, per Paul and the early church fathers, believed that Jesus was a human being who died on a cross. Why? (I hear a choir of mythicist morons insisting that the apostle Paul was a fictional creation too). Even the groups that denied Jesus was flesh and blood didn't dispute his human appearance. The problem with mythicism, apart from its dubious ad hoc methodology which is inherently biased against all texts affirming Jesus' historicity (including Josephus and Tacitus, who remain two extremely powerful witnesses after Paul and Mark's Gospel) is that it has nothing substantial to offer as an alternative explanation for the birth and growth of Christianity. Contrarily, the historicists possess a number of plausible scenarios for how the faith came to take the form it did, and none of them require special pleading and outlandish speculation.

(Emphasis mine)

Ok, that is simply not true. Christianity comes along at a time in history when Hellenistic Mystery Cults were extremely common in the Roman Empire, and these cults had several things in common:

• They generally blended Hellenistic figures and principles with figures and principles from other cultures
  
• They tended to denote a shift from community religion to a more personal and individual salvation
  
• They tended to center around stories of struggling and/or dying-and-rising gods who originally represented the changing of the seasons in some capacity
  

Considering the religious climate of the time, there is no reason to believe that a Jewish-flavored Mystery Cult wouldn't have sprung up in a form much like the others. Furthermore, there are ample reasons for one or more sects of Jews to invent a fictional messiah character, the foremost of which is that the line of David died out before producing the Messiah it was supposed to. Creating a heavenly Messiah that could be made in the celestial realms out of David's cosmic sperm was a perfect way to solve that problem because there did not have to be a historical story for the visions and scriptures of that story to be accepted.

Another fun fact...rewriting the gods into historical fictions with extant human characters was also extremely common during this period, hence the version of the gospel story that survives today.

The bottom line is that, in the context of history, it is not that difficult to explain the rise of Christianity under the Christ Myth, even without resorting to conspiracy theories. Christianity is not unique among the religions of the time, and the historicity of Christ has virtually no impact on whether a Jewish Mystery Cult was likely to form. Plenty of the day's religions formed around extant god characters with no historicity.