For People Who Think There Was No Historical Jesus

[EGross]

What Minimalist might be suggested is that during the first 2-3 centuries, the Christian communities grew up as autonomous fifedomes.

It would only be with Constantine that all of this would change, a unification, and so someone who believed that Jesus was akin to Hercules would be hard pressed to relate to the Christianity that came after Constantine (which Emperor Julian, who came after him, tried to dismantle, but failed. All hail Zeus!).

Pagan Romans wouldn't have bothered to study the differences in beliefs that the various Christian sects had. They would have just called all followers of these sects Christians the same as we refer to all followers of today's 40,000 different denominations as Christians.

It's unlikely that there were a lot of different sects in Nero's day because Christianity hadn't been around for long. I don't think early Christianity being different from later Christianity is a good reason to suspect there were no Christians at all in Nero's Rome.

Ah, good point. Although, you do have Pauls Epistles where chastises the leaders of other groups for contaminating their teachings by using Jewish symbolism. So we know that, if you hold these were written by Paul, there was some variations going on. If not, we can hold that it was at a later time.

I would also suggest that if a Jew today could get on a Tardis and whoosh himself to the time of King David (when there also was no temple), that it would be a completely foreign Judaism in most cases (today, he would probably be seen as a zealot who took on all kinds of non-Jewish traditions). Never mind that the Hebrew would be different, but they still might be able to communicate.

The TARDIS has a telepathic translation circuit so travellers would be able to communicate.

You get a thumbs up for that one!

A modern Jew would be able to learn the differences and see that David's kingdom wasn't as great as tradition makes it out to be.

If you walk through the "City of David" Archeological site, you get the see how crude the place really was. They did, however, have what appeared to have a stone toilet with a run-off! If I were a king, I would certainly have wanted one of those! They also found the tunnels as described when they needed to escape through an aqueduct system. But being 6' tall, I had to duck just about everywhere I went.

The big time was during Solomon, when he put people into slavery, taxed them to death, was the richest man in the world ruling over the poorest. The place was supposedly magnificent then. And the Jewish sages, to speak of his end saying in a Midrash: "He left his throne to wander through his kingdom, and in his place sat a demon." - Meaning, he sure wasn't what he started out to be.