Underseer
Contributor
So what is the evidence to support the claim there was a Historical Jesus?
I'm not aware of any and don't think there is any so this should not take long. ...
Bring it,
Who, in the Roman Empire, could possibly have gained from making him up? Read the two different accounts of Socrates (who undoubtedly existed), then go back to the NT - they are far less consistent than the Gospels, which are manifestly by different people. American conspiracy theories are way out of hand!
If the logic of your argument were sound, then no one would invent religions ever.
So if you truly believe that your argument is valid, then you must conclude that all religions are true. Since the Bible claims to represent the one and only true religion, then if the logic of your argument is good, then the Bible must be false.
But thankfully for you, your argument is just an appeal to consequence fallacy.
Who benefits? Lots of people benefit.
The leaders of the resulting religion gain wealth and political influence. The state gains a new mechanism for controlling the masses. The fact that the Roman empire made Christianity the official state religion proves that powerful Romans considered Christianity to be a useful political control mechanism.
It's the same exact benefits for creating any religion.
Look, any piece of historical evidence has to meet certain criteria in order to be accepted by historians. The evidence we have for Socrates meets this criteria. The Bible would be rejected if it failed even one of those historical criteria, but the Bible actually manages to fail every single one of those criteria, and there are no corroborating contemporaneous sources validating anything in the Bible other than the names of places and peoples. If that is your standard for historical evidence, then all historical fiction is true.
Why do a majority of the relevant scholars think the character of Jesus in the New Testament is at least in part based on a real person? That conclusion is based purely on circumstantial evidence, and it is worth looking at.
For instance, the census of Quirinius did not happen. Not only did it not happen, but there has never been a census that forced families to move back to the birthplace of the head of household. So the Bible is clearly lying about the census of Quirinius. However, it's the obvious reason for the lie that provides circumstantial evidence for Jesus. That lie is in the New Testament in order to shoehorn Jesus into "fulfilling" some prophecy.
If Jesus were entirely fictional, then why not change the story to have him be born in that city in the first place? Why tell an elaborate lie in order to claim Jesus "comes from" a particular town like that? While there are many possible explanations for this, the simplest explanation is that the story started with a real person who was not born in the correct town to fulfill the prophecy, and that later authors of the Bible lied in order to claim that Jesus fulfilled the prophecy.
That particular lie in the New Testament simply makes more sense if you assume the character of Jesus was in part based on a real person.
Obviously, the character of Jesus is also based on a large number of fictional characters, but we don't need to go into that, do we? If at least one of the inspirations for that character was real, then we can't say that Jesus was entirely mythical.