[Serious] Time to embrace Islam!

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

I don't, for several reasons:

-There are no contemporaneous mentions of Jesus (please don't bother to list those that you think qualify.  They don't.)

-We have nothing written by Jesus.

-The later accounts of Jesus are internally inconsistent, and inconsistent with each other.

-The miracles attributed to Jesus in those accounts are re-worked versions of miracles from other religions.

-A very good case can be made that Christianity would have proceeded as it did without an historic Jesus.

Boru

This is where the discussion gets interesting.  You’ve just made five unsupported claims.  Actually six with “please don’t bother to list those that you think qualify.  They don’t”.  I’m perfectly willing to talk specifics with regards to evidence but wouldn’t a starting point be a willingness to at least weigh the evidence on the merits?

I’m curious how the "Jesus myth" was perpetrated.  This claim seems to be the most outrageous.  One of the, arguably, most written about figures in human history has been made up?  The idea that Jesus never existed is as much a fantastic claim as to say Abraham Lincoln didn’t exist.  The story of Jesus of Nazareth is one that has been corroborated many times over and repeated for over two thousand years.  If Jesus did not exist then we have one of the biggest conspiracies ever perpetrated?  Perpetrated by generations of individuals with a oneness of purpose in the perpetration.  I wonder what the purpose would be for a conspiracy spanning over two thousand years of a phantom named Jesus.

There are certainly contemporaneous mentions of Jesus but you have deemed them unqualified by your standards I assume.

Max

If my claims are unsupported, you'll need to show contemporaneous accounts (meaning accounts written during his purported lifetime) of a figure who corresponds to the Jesus of the Gospel narrative.

You can, of course, list whatever accounts you think would support an historic Jesus.  I only asked that you not do so because these (Tacitus, Pliny, Josephus, etc) have been refuted so often that it becomes tiresome.

If being frequently written about is a basis for historicity, then King Arthur and Robin Hood are historic figures.  But perpetuation of the Jesus myth isn't all that hard to explain.  It perpetuated in the same way that any other religion does.  Are you claiming that the figures in Greek mythology and Hinduism are historic?

But I don't think the Jesus myth is a conspiracy in the sense you seem to be using the word.  I suspect that the great majority of Christians sincerely believe in an historic Jesus and aren't trying to fool anybody about it, which would seem to be required for this to be a conspiracy.

Boru