Regarding Jesus

[Confused Ape]

Not, in any way shape or form, jesus, or even worth calling jesus.

Any real man underneath all the myths and legends would be nothing like he's portrayed in the Bible. Myths and legends can be attached to real people - Francis Drake is an example of this. We definitely know Drake existed.

Except that people don't need to hallucinate in order to tell a ghost story, nor does there have a to be any actual person upon whom the ghost is based.

Ghost Stories - Visits From The Deceased

The dead stay with us, that much is clear. They remain in our hearts and minds, of course, but for many people they also linger in our senses—as sights, sounds, smells, touches or presences. Grief hallucinations are a normal reaction to bereavement but are rarely discussed, because people fear they might be considered insane or mentally destabilised by their loss. As a society we tend to associate hallucinations with things like drugs and mental illness, but we now know that hallucinations are common in sober healthy people and that they are more likely during times of stress.

A Common Hallucination
Mourning seems to be a time when hallucinations are particularly common, to the point where feeling the presence of the deceased is the norm rather than the exception. One study, by the researcher Agneta Grimby at the University of Goteborg, found that over 80 percent of elderly people experience hallucinations associated with their dead partner one month after bereavement, as if their perception had yet to catch up with the knowledge of their beloved’s passing. As a marker of how vivid such visions can seem, almost a third of the people reported that they spoke in response to their experiences. In other words, these weren’t just peripheral illusions: they could evoke the very essence of the deceased.

Why would we assume any of that? Why do we have to insist upon jesus?

I'm just looking at possibilities based on what 21st century peoples' brains produce as anomalous experiences and wondering if that kind of thing had anything to do with the start of the Jesus myth. After all, brains would have been the same 2,000 years ago.

Ancient Tablet Ignites Debate on Messiah and Resurrection

JERUSALEM — A three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing a quiet stir in biblical and archaeological circles, especially because it may speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days.

If such a messianic description really is there, it will contribute to a developing re-evaluation of both popular and scholarly views of Jesus, since it suggests that the story of his death and resurrection was not unique but part of a recognized Jewish tradition at the time.

All it would need is a couple of grief hallucinations and somebody associating it with the above tradition if the interpretation of the tablet is correct. An urban legend would have been born and travellers could have taken it around the Roman Empire. The story then grew in the telling - people decided that the resurrected messiah's tomb had to be empty. Anybody who could do something miraculous as rise from the dead had to have had a miraculous birth like other characters in mythology etc. etc.

I don't see why the remote possibility there was a real man buried under all the myths and legends should be any threat to atheism.