...Your argument implies that if some folks didn't benefit then nobody benefited. It's a really poor argument.
No. My argument is that people who didn't benefit had nothing to gain from deliberately asserting things they (supposedly) knew were false. And it is those people whose evidence is being challenged - not your late-comers or folks who reside in the Vatican.
Sorry to double-dip, but I wanted to point out what I failed to mention in my previous post. This, too, is an extremely poor argument. We have boatloads of evidence of people asserting things that they probably know are false who have little or no obvious thing to gain from it. We have absolutely zero evidence to corroborate the extraordinary claims made in the Jesus myth. Zero.
There is zero evidence that thousands of followers witnessed him feeding them with only morsels of food
even though such an event should have left indelible marks in the historical record and according to GMark it happened twice.
There is zero evidence that he impressed rulers such as Herod, Jewish religious leaders, whoever the anonymous "rich young ruler" was, etc.,
even though several contemporary historians wrote about much more mundane things in the very areas in question. According to GMark chapter 5 he supposedly raised the daughter of the ruler of the synagogue (Jairus)
who had come to him from a considerable distance, evidently hearing of his fame and willing to take the risk of not being with his daughter in her final moments just on the chance that Jesus could heal her before she died. On their way back to his house some of the ruler's "people" met them to tell him his daughter had already died so why is he still troubling "the master?" Just an observation, seems a bit caustic. So Jesus continues, gets to the house, gets laughed at when he tells the crowd she's asleep, not dead. And then of course there's the raising of the dead girl.
The Jairus' daughter incident makes for great literary plot device. It includes all the best dramatic effects including a hero who is being ridiculed by everyone near the climax of the story and the obligatory bitch-slapping delivered to all the nay-sayers. But it just doesn't jive with the historical record in any sense of the word. If this man had made anywhere near the impact implied by this story (and the accompanying interwoven tale of the massive throngs pressing him during the entire journey) he would have left
some mark on the contemporary historical record. But if these adventures had been fabricated over decades safely removed hundreds of miles away (Rome is approximately 1500 miles away from Jerusalem) the distance and time involved would have protected the storytellers from any gainsay. They didn't have to prove anything; they just had to sound convincing. That's how religion works.
We don't have to know
why every story was made up to recognize a story when we hear it. It is obvious to anyone who is truly willing to be objective that the Jesus myth is a collection of fabrications about a character who may or may not have existed. I understand why it is so difficult if you
want to believe these stories to be objective. Trust me, I used to be a true believer and know
exactly how that feels.
At the every least the character was obscure and never made anywhere near the splash indicated by these myths. And recognizing that miracle stories are a dime a dozen -- scratch that, they're a farthing for a freighter -- we need better evidence than the anonymous tales of people two generations and hundreds of miles removed from the scene to give them anything more than a thumbs up for great writing.
