Shit. What The Hell. Jesus Never Existed

[Mudhammam]

The question for me is what was in the mind of the gospel authors? If it was a human, clearly they didn't know which human in particular as they had no frame of reference outside of gossip.

To your first question, I see the Gospel writers as attempting to paint a portrait - with the aid of embellishment - of a man whom they believed to have been divinely inspired in his words and deeds, and who clearly had a deeply felt impact on many of those he encountered, whether friend or foe. To your second, how else was information to spread in the 1st century, amongst the 90% who could neither read nor write? YouTube?

Trying to randomly find people who fit the profile is kind of irrelevant, in my opinion, because that doesn't tell us what they were really playing at. Clearly they were in the business of making shit up, that's obvious from the fantastical details they include. I think it's a fair estimate that their goal was spreading a religious agenda, but what process did they go through?

Well, you're not going to "find" anyone from the 1st century with a photo ID sitting next to their bones. Read any document from the ancient world that relates to a revered figure - or idea; you will quickly realize just how much they were, after all, writing in an era that was both VERY credulous and religious, when only half a century later the Emperor Hadrian could get away with deifying his recently deceased but still beloved servant boy Antinuos and establish a temple cult for him - not to mention the string of despots before him whom the public called gods. Embellishment was utilized from a number of possible motivations, from sincere adoration and poetic license to ambitious rivalry and profitable fraud. Given that the Gospel writers appear, and probably were, deriving their information from multiple sources, all of this could have come into play, as well as factual detail. That's what historians endeavor to extract, and pretty much all of them agree that there are indeed facts to be gleaned.