Ask a Catholic

[Randy Carson]

My take is that Tim O'Neill nailed this on his blog. Responding to the italicized bit below, Tim provides a pretty solid answer.

First up: I've searched for it and it seems there's a great controversy over who the teacher of righteousness may have been... however, the names "Yeshu" and "Jesus the pharisee" are never even candidates:
http://www.ida.net/graphics/shirtail/deadsea.htm
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jso...19666.html

I could also not find a reference to that "Jesus the pharisee" anywhere, in the 10 minutes I spent googling that guy and Alexander Jannaeus. This later dude does seem to have crucified or hung some 800 pharisees... if one of them was called Jesus... well.... why not?

So, it seems that, once more, Tim O'Neil is not aware of the teacher of righteousness... Oh, but he is!
http://www.rationalskepticism.org/christ...-2560.html

   Or that Jesus and his followers were part of the same socio-religious environment that produced the DSS. How would you determine the difference between "borrowing" from them and simply being from the same culture as them angelo?

Which brings us back to the similarities in the extraordinary details of both tales. That's how, Tim.
WUT?! Both guys resurrect after 3 days?!

Second up: I agree.... Why set up the stories some 100 years after the fact? Indeed, it needs explaining... but if the tale is told a few decades after the real fact, where no fact-checking is possible, it could have happened 10, 20, 100 years before... no one would know.... and no one who maybe could fact-check it was interested in the story (the pharisee priests? the romans?).
Maybe (and here I go into pointless speculation) the person telling the tale just didn't know... and used some elements from memory - some roman guy that was the big boss when the storyteller was a kid... or something. I'd like to know how things happened back then, but, except for the use of a time machine, there's no way we can find out, is there?

Yep.

The eleven disciples sat around one night shortly after the death of Jesus (and Judas) trying to figure out what to do next. While fishing and tax collecting were obvious choices, there was no general agreement. 

As the night wore on and more wine was consumed, someone starting talking about the legend of Yeshu...one thing led to another...and they all swore a blood oath to never reveal the secret of how they invented the Legend of Jesus of Nazareth. 

I'll close with this: before I ventured into this forum, I knew that Christianity has its lunatic fringes. Now, I see that atheism does, too. As Bart Ehrman wrote in response to Richard Carrier, "My view is that there is no reason to take seriously people who cannot be taken seriously:  a few indications of general incompetence is good enough."