Christianity a scam?

[Mister Agenda]

There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding of the proposition: that the founder of Christianity, a rabbi known as Yeshua, may have been a scam artist. This does not imply that the devoted followers of Yeshua were in on the scam. A cult leader who has his followers so convinced that they would die for him is not something we don't still see today. An apostle sacrificing himself for his faith almost certainly did so sincerely, but that does not contradict the idea that the originator of the teachings was performing a scam. And there were multiple wonder-working messiahs wandering around Palestine in those days, apparently.

So it's possible that one of them was a scammer who hit pay-dirt and started something lasting.

Is it probable? I don't think so.

Even if the 'wonder-working' was tricks, it doesn't mean Yeshua was insincere. Apparently you had to perform some wonders to get taken seriously by the masses in that time and place. It's only a scam if it's for personal gain, if the aim was really to spread sincerely believed doctrine, the wonder-working tricks would have been showmanship in service to a genuinely believed-in cause.

Or Yeshua could have been a simple teacher, and the wonders were added later as embellishment of oft-told stories. That's pretty common as well (ascribing miraculous events to venerated individuals), and is also something we continue to see today. Legends have a tendency to grow until they're larger-than-life, especially in oral tradition.

Or if there is such a thing as the supernatural, Yeshua could have really been performing the miraculous feats ascribed to him.

Or he was a composite holy figure, with stories about different religious leaders being conflated together and consolidated under one name.

Or he was originally a figurative spiritual character who was later ret-conned into having lived as a real, physical person.

There are too many possibilities combined with too little evidence to say more about the 'scam artist hypothesis' than that it's one of the possibilities. Many atheists don't believe there ever was a real, historical Yeshua, of course if they're correct, if he wasn't real, he definitely wasn't a scam artist. A figure so shrouded by only being reported by those who venerated him as the actual son of the creator of the universe is always going to be mysterious unless relevant evidence that clarifies who he really was comes to light. And of course it won't seem unclear at all to someone who takes all the stories about him at face value, provided they're the stories recorded in the biblical canon.