Part of Notre Dame on fire.

[Brian37]

There's just no reason to believe it's genuine other than faith, since it only appeared in history more than a thousand years after the event took place, like every Jesus story or artifact I can think of.

That is my point, and not just with Christianity, but all of antiquity and every religion back then.

It makes much more sense to me that humans made up bad claims, and bought and sold them because the marketing benefited them.

Even with Buddhism. At least in the west, there is a false romantic idea that Buddhism is a philosophy, and not a religion. But if one were to study the overlap of the very close geography of India where the first claims pop up, and considers the overlap of concepts like reincarnation, and Karma , and find the Queen Maya mother of Buddha mythology, it is obvious, at least to me, someone, or some group of humans didn't like the old Hindu ways and, just like the Jesus Character incorporated the Hebrews, created a new religion based on older and surrounding mythologies.

Even the Rasta religion is nothing but a spin off mix of African/Jewish/Catholic motifs.

I just watched a documentary on PBS about the origins of the "flood" myth, last night. To their credit they referenced the older polytheistic "Epic Of Gilgamesh" flood myth. They even went as far as reconstructing the ROUND boat, that would have been used in reality for the real local floods that were quite frequent and common in Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

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Religion succeeds or fails like any product you buy, marketing. Think of any dead product no longer sold, or old defunct company that no longer exists. The Edsel and  DeLorean both failed, but were still ideas based on prior and surrounding concepts.