https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euhemerism...Christians
So Price, and slightly later Richard Carrier, would buy into your #3. One group had a hallucination that their boy came back from the dead and concocted a poorly-written biography for him to have been an actual person at a time conveniently outside of the memory of anyone living. When they attained a measure of political power they denounced all the other groups as heretics and suppressed them.
Remember Price and Carrier when some asshole claims that "real scholars" buy their bullshit.
Quote:In his 2011 book, The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems, former Baptist pastor and double PhD in religious studies Robert M. Price supported the Christ myth theory when he wrote "the story of Jesus which we have, in every form, remains a redemption myth constructed along the lines of the universal mythic hero archetype, with no "secular," biographical material left over. When we are done dismantling the records and we begin ghoulishly picking through the scanty remains for clues to an underlying "historical Jesus," like people scavenging gold from the teeth and fingers of the battlefield dead, are we perhaps engaging in Euhemerism?"
So Price, and slightly later Richard Carrier, would buy into your #3. One group had a hallucination that their boy came back from the dead and concocted a poorly-written biography for him to have been an actual person at a time conveniently outside of the memory of anyone living. When they attained a measure of political power they denounced all the other groups as heretics and suppressed them.
Remember Price and Carrier when some asshole claims that "real scholars" buy their bullshit.
