Did Jesus exist?

[The Grand Nudger]

The "embarrassing details" defense.  There isn't enough conformity to the preceding myths or legends?  If it was myth or legend they would have simply written it in a more confirming way?   Do you think that the people who wrote the gospels actually -knew- the older myths that well?  If I write a book that doesn't stick close enouigh to Star Wars cannon as a sequel, does that mean that my book is no longer sci-fi?

Do I think that they knew the Torah well? Yes I do. Jewish mythicism is what we're talking about. And that's a poor analogy. Star Wars would be the only major sci-fi story anybody in the area cared about, and you'd have to make a sequel close enough to Star Wars for it to garner any attention. There was never any expectation in Judaism that the Messiah would be killed, so it seems improbable that a Messianic sect would make up a dead Messiah.

There's no need to suggest that they did.  So it doesn't matter whether or not it's improbable, whatever that means to you.

What are you giving me that link for? All that matters there would be the bit about Serapion of Antioch. I'm not sure why it says that he denied the human/historical Jesus though (unless I'm misreading it.) He never denied it. He accepted Christ's existence and the word of Peter being Christ's word. He said the Gospel of Peter as he read it was a forgery. "For we, brethren, receive both Peter and the rest of the apostles as Christ Himself."

The link describes precisely those scenarios you were describing, asking where they were.   There -were- people who thought that the human christ was bullshit.  Council was, indeed, convened, lol. Ultimately they were the losers in the dogma game. None of the various machinations of different sects and trains of thought within the faithful speak to the veracity of the account upon which their faith is built. All of that was there, as it has been in every faith, regardless of and entirely unrelated to the historicity of their accounts, their characters.

Jesus-as-man is culturally christian modern euhemerism. It may help to explain the history of religion, not it's historicity, mind you...but these stories rely only on -belief- that their accounts are truthful, the actual truth of the account is a non-factor.