Did Jesus Even Really Exist?

[DeistPaladin]

I couldn't give a fuck, tbh.

I don't believe in any of the miracle bullshit, so I don't care if he existed. It would be as significant as one wondering if a man called Wallace lived in in Scotland 500 years ago You could easily make up a story involving this Wallace and pass it around as truth... It would probably eventually catch on.

It's actually shakier than that.

I hold characters of religion and folklore to a higher standard than mundane characters of history. The basis of this higher standard is ECREE combined with a knowledge of how folklore routinely blurs the lines between fact and fantasy.

For example, and this one is often cited by apologists, Socrates was a Greek philosopher. This is hardly an extraordinary claim. Further, the forces that shape urban legend are unlikely to manufacture such an ordinary character.

Heroes of a society, like Hercules, Gilgamesh, Hiawatha, Moses, King Arthur and Jesus, who's stories are mixed in with the stuff of fantasy, are more suspect because the same forces of mythmaking that can fabricate magical stories can just as easily fabricate a person.

We know that even today, in the modern age of communication where fact checking is just a mouse click away, glurge stories spread all over the internet. A work of fiction can later be retold as a "true story". Details are added as the story is passed along. It continues to get better with the telling. So it can happen with the stories of folk heroes and therefore we need to take them with that much more skepticism.