Was Jesus of Nazareth a religious loon?

[Vicki Q]

Mark, of course, does not have an Virgin Birth narrative, and Matthew & Luke offer varying versions; Paul seems either ignorant and/or disinterested entirely.  As for John, it's irrelevant, as for him and his community, Jesus was preexistent to his birth.

I doubt, in the extreme, that either Matthew or Luke's account contain any real history, other than the fact (probably historical) that Jesus was born in Nazareth.  We have the extreme tale of King Herod's "massacre of the innocents" not recorded by any contemporary pagan or Jewish historians, and as such, most modern scholars regard it as being myth and/or fable, which makes the whole of Matthew's account, written nearly a century after the supposed events completely suspect.

Matthew and Luke do deal with the birth of Jesus differently, but both agree in their statement of a virgin birth. Because the two accounts are so different, it seems reasonable to say that the Early Church believed in the virgin birth. Some Christians think that's how it was; others find it helpful to place that belief in a tray marked 'maybe' and still others in a tray marked 'wrong'. Variable mileage.

I really don't think Paul would be expected to mention it as he's dealing with other things, and John as you say also has other theological fish to fry. Mark's failure to include Jesus's birth may just be for the same reason he doesn't include a description of the resurrection- whatever that is (but Mark does pre-suppose it!).

Where we disagree is on the massacre of the innocents. We know a lot about Herod from Josephus. Herod was a crazy psychopath for whom killing the infant population of a small village (about a dozen) would have been entirely in character in the last years of his reign, and would barely have been noticed amongst other craziness (the murders of many family members, trying to get a stadium load of Jewish leaders to be killed after his death so that people would be crying...).

If the evidence isn't there that it did happen, the arguments against aren't exactly conclusive either.