The study of myths can be fruitful (and interesting!) for various reasons.
Here's Michael Witzel's discussion of myths he thinks are 40,000 years old! No, Michael Witzel is not some inbred Jesus Freak who thinks Charlie Brown is a historic character. He is the Wales Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University.
There is archaeological evidence of Central Eurasian (probably Hunnic) influence in Scandinavia. As far as I know, such visits by Huns are not recorded in any history. Yet they MIGHT be hinted at in the 13th-century works of Snorri Sturluson describing Odin's arrival from Hunnland while bringing a new religion. It may be impossible to disentangle anything of historical value from Snorri's accounts of the mythical Odin, but is it wrong to try?
The myth of Arthur is interesting — too interesting to even begin comment here! But one tidbit about the myth's documentation sheds some light on ancient manuscripts: The first alleged mention of Arthur — and this mention already treats him in mythical terms — is in Stanza XCIX of
Y Gododdin. That long poem was allegedly penned in the early 7th century but the oldest extant copy is a 13th-century vellum.
And that copy is missing the final pages, including Stanza XCIX !.
Contrast this with the huge number of ancient papyri and parchments that survive related to Jesus, including several hundred BEFORE the earliest copy of Tacitus. (What's the oldest extant copy of
Taledot Yeshu again?)
We KNOW that Christian cult(s) experienced very rapid growth in the decades immediately following the crucifixion of the historic Jesus. This is a fact, and a fact that obviously had a very profound impact on the history of Europe.
There are lots of quotations attributed to Albert Einstein but which he never said. Does this mean we should dismiss Einstein as an unimportant fiction? Perhaps there was some preacher more eloquent than the Nazarene and "Matthew" placed those more eloquent words — which scholars know were originally in Aramaic though "Matthew" wrote in Greek — into his Gospel. Dos that mean we should ignore this man who somehow inspired major cult(s) and treat him as fiction?
Sarcasm seems to rule here. (If we think there was a historic Jesus, we think Charlie Brown and Hemingway's Santiago were also historic.) so I'll ask:
Was Albert Einstein fictional? Davy Crockett didn't kill a bear when he was three; does that make him fictional? John Brown was compared to Christ; was he also a fiction?
We can be sure that the historic Jesus had some sort of charisma, but was he an eloquent speaker?
We don't know. Did he have some hypnotic or healing powers?
We don't know. Did he exist?
There are HUGE circumstantial reasons to say that he almost certainly did exist. It is the mythicists who grasp at straws.
