Q about arguments for God's existence.

[Mudhammam]

If we were making up a story about God, how many people would make him become a man, be humiliated, and be executed as a criminal?

I agree it doesn't seem to make sense given the Jewish Messianic context.

However, look at it another way. Jesus was believed to be the Messiah ready to save the Jews from the Roman oppression. Yet, he died without managing to achieve this prediction. So the early Christians had to come up with something to continue to cling to hope. Thus, the resurrection and then the later idea that Jesus was God who came to this world in the flesh to die for our sins and be resurrected after doing so. The salvation, rather than physical, became a spiritual one from sin (rather than from the Romans).

There are a hundred different theories one can come up with that better explain the data we possess from the early Christians, all of which are FAR more plausible than the Zombie Jesus Hypothesis. For one, we have a gazillion other religions to consider, numerous within our lifetimes, and it's patently obvious: people are very gullible. We know the first converts were generally illiterate and poor, and politically powerless. There's a pretty good motive for transferring one's life project from the polis, the city-state--which would have been considered a way of salvation--onto the timid individual. The idea of man-gods was adopted by Christians, perhaps Jesus himself (though more likely Paul) as a way of marketing strictly Jewish concepts to a Gentile crowd, and clearly it worked. Not to mention, if we take the New Testament seriously, resurrections were more common than earthquakes.