Christians - What would you do if it were discovered Jesus never existed?

[Redbeard The Pink]

I've read in mythicist writings that possibly in the very early church, Jesus was not supposed to be an actual human being who walked the earth, but was rather thought to exist in a spiritual realm. Does anyone recall details of how that worked? Anyways, maybe the Christians could simply go back to such an "abstract" notion of Jesus.

As Rob put forward, Richard Carrier is the foremost expert that utilizes this line of reasoning, and his ideas pretty much took the last few puffs of wind out of my faith.


I didn't see the exact video Rob posted, but I'm sure his is similar; Carrier uses religious trends of the time, language from the few undisputed Epistles, and non-Biblical Christian text (namely very early redactions of "The Ascension of Isaiah") to demonstrate that the original Jesus was likely created as a heavenly figure to be the Messiah that could no longer come from the line of David (because that actually died off long before Jesus is supposed to have been born). Because no human messiah could be born, some authors might have created a deified one and placed his struggles in the heavenly realms where nobody could adequately dispute them.


In this early version of the story, Jesus is supposed to have descended through the various levels of Heaven and Hell, disguising himself as denizens of each level as he goes. When he reaches the lowest level of Hell, the Devil and his demons think Jesus is just another demonic soul to be tortured, punished, and destroyed, so they abuse and kill him not realizing that his death will bring about salvation for humans. He is resurrected, appears to various mortals in visions or whatever, and then ascends back to heaven to sight at the right hand of the throne of blah blah blah...


Carrier posits that later on, a humanized version of the character was written as a parable designed to make sense to followers but not to outsiders; outsiders were meant to think they were talking about a real person, but insiders would have known that this was not the original version of the character, but a humanized super-parable full of other parables designed to teach them blahdy blahdy blah blah blah...


Somewhere along the way, the church allegedly decided to go with the story of the human Jesus and decided that was what everything hinged on, so they kind of tried to sweep ghost Jesus under the carpet since he was a lesser-known insider mystery to begin with.


Like I said, this is what kicked the last few pegs out from under my faith. I realize lots of people (some of whom are atheists) dispute this line of reasoning pretty vehemently, but I've since realized that even on the unlikely off-chance that even if Jesus of Nazareth was based on a single, historical human with the same name, that dude wasn't magic and he wasn't the son of anything but a random Jewish couple somewhere on the ass of the Roman empire.