Shit. What The Hell. Jesus Never Existed

[robvalue]

To me the most sensible mythicist-type position is that there are way too many potential "historical Jesuses" to have any hope of identifying a single person as being a sound basis for the story. I think this is perfectly reasonable given what little information can actually be verified, the wealth of similar preacher/nutters around at the time, the almost completely fictional nature of the story, the name not even being correct...

If I had to pick a position, it would be this one. It's not that there is "no historical figure", it's that there are too many to say it is actually one person with any degree of confidence. To point to any of them in particular would be pretty much arbitrary as they probably would all fit certain parts of the story in different ways, and all may have played a small part in the story.

The chances of the story not being influenced by more than one real person at some point seems ludicrously low to me, even before the myths get piled on top of it. The Jesus character does not read like a single person either but rather a weird amalgamation.

When the people writing his story had never even met "him" and were relying on hearsay, even if you could ask them exactly who they were writing about they wouldn't be able to say with any confidence. There may well have been a single guy who was more responsible for the story than any others who got rolled up in it, and if you want to call that guy "the historical Jesus" then that's cool