Atheists being asked about the existence of Jesus

[Pat Mustard]

Sigh. I have no idea why the historical/mythical jesus debate gets so many people all bent out of shape.

Seems to me there are only 3 real possibilities with a fourth supernatural one.

A. There was a real person, Jesus. Maybe, but the evidence is thin on the ground.

B. The Jesus character is and amalgam of several disparate messianic/apocalyptic jewish prophets wandering the Levant in or around the period in question. We know there were plenty of those.

C. Entire fiction. We know people have been creating fiction for thousands of years, so entirely possible.

The socio-political aspects can, I think, be ignored since they apply equally to any scenario.

Personally, I favour a mix of B and C as most likely. A is least likely. Just my opinion.

That leads us to D. Jesus the man-god. This is, obviously, stupid on it's face as an idea. I think christians know this at some level, thus they go after option A in order to later slippery-slope their way to D. Dishonest tactic, but we know how flexible with the truth believers show themselves to be.

You forgot E: Jesusism (probably more properly Saulism) is one of the many mystery cults which were around at the time, badly and amateurishly grafted onto the various jewish holy books which had gotten a Greek translation to a) attract the Greek speaking jews and b) leech some legitimacy to cover the scam.

Given the gospel stories and the practices of the early Jesus cults, I've become increasingly happy with this interpretation.