Why do atheists even bother about debating Jesus?

[Confused Ape]

You are starting to build a reference library that has helped formed my case against "modern Christianity"
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Jewish temples are believed to be early banks. Notice how there were "money-changers" AND "those who sold pidgeons"?

Looks like Jesus thought the money-changers should have set up a bank somewhere other than the temples.

If you read the story Pilate, the crowd says some crazy things that I believe are Roman forgeries to defer blame.
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I think you made a post about that somewhere in this topic. The idea presented in this post was that the Romans wouldn't want to hear that they were responsible for executing God's son so the account was forged to blame the Jews. This makes a lot of sense.

God On The Brain suggests a line of speculation in relation to all this.

PROF VILAYANUR RAMACHANDRAN (University of California, San Diego): It's possible that many great religious leaders had temporal lobe seizures and this predisposes them to having visions, having mystical experiences.

NARRATOR: St Paul is a case in point. He famously encountered god who appeared to him in a blinding flash on the road to Damascus.

RAMACHANDRAN: Many religious mystics, including St Paul, some of the experiences they describe sound quite similar to the sorts of things you hear from patients, so it's quite possible that he had seizures.

What if Paul really did have a temporal lobe seizure and interpreted it as Jesus telling him off for persecuting his followers? The bit about Paul's companions also hearing the voice could have been added to make people believe that it was a real event and not something which was all in his own mind. Once Paul believed that he was meant to convert people to Christianity he made things up as he went along because he didn't have a clue about what Jesus really taught.