Regarding Jesus

[Confused Ape]

Or- again, it's just a story.

So how did it get started?

Since when is any story "based on nothing"? Conversely, is Dracula "based on" vampires...or Vlad Tepish? No.

Bram Stoker based his book on both vampire legends and Vlad Tepesh whose real name was something like Vlad Dracula depending on how it was spelled.

His Romanian patronymic Dragwlya (or Dragkwlya)[3] Dragulea, Dragolea, Drăculea,[4][5] is a diminutive of the epithet Dracul carried by his father Vlad II, who in 1431 was inducted as a member of the Order of the Dragon, a chivalric order founded by Sigismund of Hungary in 1408. Dracul is the Romanian definite form, the -ul being the suffixal definite article (deriving from Latin ille). The noun drac "dragon" itself continues Latin draco. Thus, Dracula literally means "Son of the Dragon". In Modern Romanian, the word drac has adopted the meaning of "devil" (the term for "dragon" now being balaur or dragon). This has led to misinterpretations of Vlad's epithet as characterizing him as "devilish".

We know how this story got started along with who started it and why. Did a story teller decide to compose a tale about a messiah to tell in market places for money and people thought the tale was true?

Plenty of legendaries in the US as well. Some of which actually have no relation to the character upon which the legend is formed - and were ensconsed in absentia of knowledge on that front with regards to anything but the characters name.

Which could apply to some failed messiah who became an urban legend.

Some were self promoted. All were stories, no more and no less. No one hallucinated Paul Bunyon or Big John or Wild Bill, eh?

Paul Bunyan is a fictional character who may or may not have been based on folklore. Big John is a song. People don't have grief hallucinations about fictional characters.

(and consider for a moment, the one that we do know existed in a concrete way- bears the least resemblance to his story double)

Wild Bill was a real person who ended up with stories told about him.

There's all kinds of reasons why the story of Jesus got started. I suggested two of them. I'm interested in hearing other people's suggestions.