I still don't understand why anyone would make up a person like the Biblical Christ..

[Epimethean]

First of all, what about all the fulfilled prophecies from the Old Testament? If we, as skeptics contend, do not really know who wrote the books of the Bible, then how do we know that they "fit in" the prophecies from the Old Testament that were about Christ, to the New Testament?

Secondly, why not make up a messianic figure who would be a politlcal/military deliverer from Rome-which, AFIK, is what the Jews of the time expected the messiah to be. Then we would know that the NT (and the rest of the Bible) to be nonsense. But that is not what we find-we find someone who spoke to a Samaritan woman-when Samaritan's were considered racial half-breeds by the Jews, and a woman's testimony was not considered valid in court at the time.

With all due respect to everyone on this site, why would any of this be made up???

Sae's response hit this one home. Like most any made up superbeing (Santa, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy for parents; Ronald Reagan for Republicans; Chuck Norris for the rest of us), Jesus was a perfect vector for drawing forward an agenda of mass control.