Open debate: What does Jesus teach?

[DeistPaladin]

I don't even know what you're trying to say.
The New Testament was compiled long after Jesus, sure, but the material that was in it came about much earlier.
That doesn't change the fact that their stories are too similar to be different stories and too divergent to have been collaborated on.

There was no collaboration to create a new religion. No skeptic that I know of is claiming that there was.

Christian apologetic logic seems to love creating false dichotomies and strawmanning the hell out of one conclusion to work backward toward the desired one. We see this in other canned arguments such as the "Trilemma", "Die for a Lie" and "Empty Tomb".

In the case of this argument, it's important for you to realize that no skeptic is envisioning Matthew, Mark, Luke and John meeting in the back of a tavern one day discussing how they're going to just make up Jesus and create a new religion. It is true that some cults are cynically fabricated by one or a group of con artists but more often religions and urban legends are shaped in a different, less deliberate way.

We do now know that "Christianity" came in a wild variety of forms during the first few centuries, the diverse theological views of which would make "Catholic vs. Protestant" or even "Christian vs. Muslim" look like petty hair-splitting. One could be "Christian" in the first few centuries and believe:

1. Jesus was not a physical being but an apparition (Docetic Christian), the early conflicts against whom can be read in the Bible itself (1John 4:1-3 and 2John 1:7).
2. There are two gods and Jesus is not only separate from but completely superior to that inept fool Yahweh (Marcionite Christian). Their sect rejected the OT and all things Jewish.
3. Jesus was born as all babies are, the offspring of Mary and Joseph. He lived a normal life until he was about 30 at his baptism, when God adopted him as a son, and his miracle working ministry began (Ebionite Christian). Salvation came through keeping the OT laws. This was the most Jewish of the early Christian sects.
4. Jesus had no childhood and was never "born" but rather he appeared, as all gods do, as a fully formed adult in the temple one day (Marcionite Christian).
5. Jesus was an angel, sent by God (Arian Christian, no relation to Hitler's imaginary race).

So clearly, if there was any collaboration in early Christianity, it failed. No skeptic that I'm aware of is making any claim that there was such an attempt.

Mark was the first Gospel, at least that we know of. Luke and Matt came later, expanding in their own ways on that story but working independently and from different perspectives, thus contradicting one another between their two fan fics. John is a completely different story about a different Jesus, written from a more "advanced" perspective on Christianity when it became separated from the Jewish sect.

I have no idea how you can read John alongside the Synoptic Gospels and come away thinking these stories are "similar".