Is Christianity based on older myths?

[Mister Agenda]

Don't make the mistake of combining them all into one book. They are not.

Gosh, we must really have given the impression that we're the ones who don't know the most basic things about the construction of the Bible. When did that happen?

Okay, to sum up whether Christianity is based on myths, I am hearing the following reasoning:

1. The gospels are not accurate or are complete fiction

'Complete fiction' seems a stretch. Even the Harry Potter books aren't complete fiction.

2. Paul, Peter, John, and James had motives other than truth to write their letters

We would have to know what they believed in order to assess their honesty. We don't know what they believed, and it doesn't really matter because we also don't know what of what they did believe was really true. One obvious possibility is that they were honest and writing what they believed to be true, but were just mistaken or misinformed. Another is that like many of todays 'liars for Jesus', they thought some exaggeration was justified if it promoted belief in the worship of Jesus. After all, people who don't believe will be tortured for eternity, surely God will forgive if you say there were 5,000 people in a crowd instead of 500.

3. Therefore the narrative is fiction and the source must be recycled myths.

I think the narrative is most likely the result of decades of Chinese Whispers between whatever the actual events were and writing them down. Some people's retellings may have been conflated with earlier myths, but I doubt there was any purposeful incorporation of earlier myths by the people who finally scribed the stories.

First, why would we not assume the 8 separate writers believed what they wrote until we have evidence or a plausible motive for a significant conspiracy?

It's not so much a question of whether they believed what they wrote as whether such belief leads to accurate reporting. You should know by now that it doesn't. Writing things down while they are fresh in your mind and finding points of agreement among disparate eyewitness writers is what we conisder indicative of accurate reporting. The writers weren't journalists, they weren't chroniclers of the events in question, when it comes to Jesus, they could only report what they heard. Everything about Jesus is, at best, hearsay.

I'm inclined to think there was a historical Jesus. I am not inclined to think his words or the events of his life have been recorded with a high degree of accuracy. If he existed, he's been misquoted and mythologized and without finding new sources of information about him, we will never be able to entirely separate fact from rumor.

Do we assign this type of scrutiny to other historical documents? Can you give me an example of even a group of 5 historical documents that are attesting to something that are all thought to be intentionally false?

You really should have used your Google finger before issuing this challenge.

Or is it that you think that a plausible motive for this level of falsehood and conspiracy was to start a new belief system based on self-sacrifice, love, and humility in a political climate that was hostile to it?

What is it about so many of the theists who visit us that compels them to speculate on our thinking rather than asking about it?

I don't see any deliberate falsehood or conspiracy, but if there were, I can't think of a better motivation for it than to start a brotherhood of love and understanding. Good people will do things for what they think is a good cause that they would never do for money or power.

Lastly, the conclusion 3 does not follow from the premises 1 and 2. To get to this conclusion, you would have to insert and prove probability of the premise that the early church conspirators had access to extinct and eastern religious characters, stories, and philosophies. I would argue that if premise 1 and 2 are true, it is far more probable that any similarity to myths is coincidence.

If that were our actual reasoning intead of the reasoning you imagined for us (strawman), that would be a really powerful point, but it's not our fault that the conclusion you imagine for us doesn't follow from the premises you imagine for us.

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Belief is not truth. I don't care how much they believed what they are saying.

Can you understand the difference between a guy believing something, and the thing he believes actually being true?

Yet you are saying that somewhere in this causal chain of belief, multiple people were intentionally deceitful. This would include Paul, John, James, and Peter since they signed their letters.

Is he really saying that?