From my belief, those legends were merely attributed to Jesus in order to convince people he was the messiah.

And some people may have exaggerated some events.
Some idiot may have seen Jesus give some bread to 25 people that didn’t really fill them up, but they were grateful.

“Oh God, Jesus, thanks for all this bread! I’m so full now!”

This guy is pretty impressed that one small loaf was enough for so many people, not realizing they’re just being polite. He tries to convince some friends that Jesus fed a lot of people.

“Dudes! He fed like 100 people with one loaf!”

Then it’s like the game telephone. The message gets exagerrated. His friends say, “Listen! This dude Jesus fed like a bazillion people with one loaf!”

Anyway, the fact that the legends happened elsewhere and/or don’t make sense doesn’t discredit the historians.

As for Constantine… Certainly Christianity was brought forth to dominance because of Rome. But I’m not sure all atrocities attributed to Christianity would not have happened just because Christianity didn’t exist. During periods such as the Crusades, Christianity was merely a catalyst. Political motivations by the church and irrational hatred is what drove the wars / killing. Even if some other religion was dominant, would they not have had the desire to “fix” the heathens? Their religion would still have been different from the Muslims and they still would have probably killed them. But it’s easy to speculate because the truth is we don’t really know what would have happened.

My POV is that a specific religion is just gang colors. What’s the difference between gangs? Not a damn thing! Maybe race, maybe some orientation, maybe hobbies (bikes vs cars vs whatever), but when you get down to it, it’s all about territory and money. Well, the same is true about countries with their religious inspired wars. Your enemy doesn’t wear the right colors (religion) and/or they walked on your turf (trespassed through your country), it’s time to kill them.

So I’m sure history would be different, but I’m not so sure violence/wars/killing would have been avoided. We’d just have some other religious zealotry to blame for it.

Brian said it best. There is virtually nothing original in the Jesus myth, at least as far as the magic and origin story go. Some of the things he is alleged to have said might be unique to this story.

All I’m asking for is a little bit of corroborating evidence that the guy existed. Options A & B are probably indistinguishable from our perspective in the 21st century. If he really existed but he was some two-bit preacher, then there’s little doubt why there are no contemporaneous accounts of his existence. He was just too small for anyone to notice. Then after he’s gone, oral traditions being what they are, some of those other stories got confounded with his.

Or he never existed, but these multiple related myths got consolidated around one figure. Who knows where the name came from? It could have been made up.

In fact, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if there were several preachers in that same period who were preaching similar messages. Often throughout history, when an idea’s time has come, it will be conceived by multiple people independently. Maybe the age was ripe for sermons about peace, love, and charity. All of their sermons eventually got consolidated along with the magic tales.

So we probably can’t tell whether he existed or not, because if he existed, the evidence hasn’t survived. The bottom line is that either option A or B (or possibly C) is much more probable than any of the others. Just not as much fun. I’d laugh pretty long and hard if we ever found out that billions of people have been worshipping Alf for the last two millennia.

Christianity is an accident of history. If not for Constantine, Rome would probably have continued to embrace some form of paganism. One can only imagine the horrors Europe (and eventually the rest of the world) would have been spared if a far more tolerant form of polytheism had prevailed and the cult of Christianity had been relegated to the dustbin where it belongs.

Did Jesus exist? Frankly, I don’t care. But if I had to bet, I’d probably go with option #1. The prevalence of such stories at the time, and the utter lack of compelling evidence for his existence would seem to make that the most likely conclusion.

“One recent study has stated that biblical scholars and most historians accept the historical existence of Jesus and regard claims against his existence as ‘effectively refuted’.[35]”

Biblical scholars OF COURSE believe it, but why would most historians if there wasn’t sufficient evidence? Of course the wikipedia is not authoritative, but I’m just using it as an example. I saw a special on History Channel too a while back on the historical Jesus (ie, in a non-supernatural point of view) and the scientists they had on there were all pretty well convinced he existed in some fashion, actually asking the question “was it made up” at one point in the special at which point they all pretty well agreed he existed in varying degrees of biblical accounts (minus the supernatural stuff). Of course this could all be through rose-color glasses on their part, but that is where I base my thinking of “B” is most likely.

I don’t really even know where to begin researching the lack of actual existence, other than as a thought experiment (as in this post). I haven’t seen a good argument against from a historian with respect to evidenciary reasions why he never existed. That could be for a lack of effort on my part, but I’m just saying.

*shrug*

“I’ve arranged this list in increasing order of likelihood.”

I’m pretty darn sure you meant “decreasing”.

Thanks for the tip. I’m surprised I hadn’t heard about that book.

ParrotLover:

I used to think B was the most likely. Maybe it still is, especially if almost everything attributed to him was added later. There was a fair number of preachers wandering around in those days. One of them is bound to have accumulated enough followers to make it stick.

I guess it’s hard for me to wrap my head around somebody being completely made up and get such a large following without there already being an oral tradition that stemmed back from a real person (no matter how ordinary that person might have been).

But I guess anything is possible.

The Doctor so is not Jesus. The Doctor is too good to do something that would cause mankind to war and kill for centuries. The Master, maybe, but not the Doctor.

Hmmm. The more I think about it, the more Jesus may be Galifrean in origin. Miracles? Definitely a sonic screwdriver at work. The resurrection? Hello!? Regeneration! Although the face change might be hard to explain. Maybe that timelord’s TARDIS’ chameleon circuits worked better and with that and some psychic paper might have been able to fool people into seeing the same person he was before.

http://www.amazon.com/Behold-Man-Michael-Moorcock/dp/1585677647/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1202126967&sr=8-1