Quote:Why is the idea that there might have been a man who was obscured by myths and legends special pleading?
How much evidence is there that Hercules existed? Or Osiris? Or Thor? Or Marduk? Etc., etc. No one claims these were "historical" figures but when it comes to fucking jesus we get a pile of holy horseshit thrown up with no more evidence to back it up than there is for any of them.
People believe in lots of stupid shit. That does not make it real.
Xtianity, as we know it today, is the result of a long series of events. They have done a fairly good job of masking their early history and pretending that the shit they wrote down in the 4th century was the way it was. They got away with that because they could kill anyone who questioned.
You mentioned Nag Hamadi, Ape. They are most commonly disparaged by claiming that they are 4th century works ( many scholars date them to the 2d century, though) in Coptic and thus too late to be of value. This of course ignores the fact that most xtian texts of the so-called gospels and other shit are also 4th century and later and we have only fragmentary examples which pre-date xtianity's rise. What is generally ignored about Nag Hamadi is that scholars also agree that these were translations from Greek into Coptic which gets us back to the fact that we can't know how many times the originals were translated before someone bothered to translate them to Coptic.
The proto-orthodox line of xtian thought seems to emerge in the mid 2d century. It was one of many and there is no way of telling at this point how widespread the various gnostic forms may have been. But for someone to get a whole pile of gnostic texts ( remember that what we have from Nag Hamadi are merely the fortunate examples that survived the stupidity of the local yokels who found them) and translate them all into Coptic suggests that they were quite widespread and, even more importantly, that there was no central authority dictating what was or was not "doctrine" at the time the compilation/translation was made, and that someone in authority thought it worthwhile to do.
