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Originally Posted by Textcritic
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So, this was the world into which Jesus was born, and in which he lived. It is practically certain that Jesus was an apocalyptic revolutionary. He embraced the idea of divine intervention, and he actively campaigned for the imminent intervention of God. He may or may not have believed that he was the "messiah", that is, the anointed one of God to restore the kingdom of Israel, to defeat the Romans, and to inaugurate the kingdom of God. He attracted a good deal of attention for his ideas, and amassed a following among his local, bucolic contemporaries.
This basic storyline is what is revealed by a close read, and a historically and critically sensitive understanding of the Gospels. They are not eyewitness accounts, but they do contain numerous kernals of information that are regarded by any historical measure to be accurate reflections of a real movement led by a real man named Jesus.
Now, let's consider the contrary: that this particular Jewish messiah (Jesus was NOT the only one to make messianic claims in the first century!) was fabricated to fulfill popular Jewish expectations. That they invented a miracle-working peasant preacher to fulfil the scriptural prophecies about the divinely anointed national hero who would vanquish the enemies and oppressors of Judaea. In all honesty, why would any Jew in the first place have invented such a figure, and in the second place, why would any other Jew choose to believe in him? Apart from the purported miracles, Jesus was socially unexceptional, and were someone to invent a messiah, he most certainly would have appeared much more closely aligned to the following example:
Without even getting to the enormous problem of Jesus's death for Jews and the common messianic narrative, the case against the historical Jesus is already on very shaky ground. In short, the construct that Richard Carrier, Robert Price and the other mythicists want us to believe is neither historically nor culturally possible. It is much more probable that Jesus actually existed.
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I have never doubted that Jesus existed and that he had a following, then he was crucified by the very church hiarachy he was railing against and his followers, who were expecting the end of the world or the like, tried to make sense of their whole faith being taken apart.
At this point, a few weeks after his death, either on purpose in order to hold the faithfull together or just due to rumours that took on a life of their own, his followers started to believe he had risen from the dead and that the prophesy they were expecting had been fullfilled.
Absoloutly nothing strange about this at all, every few years we get groups of wack jobs who kill themselves because some other wack job tells them they are all off to an asteroid to live with god, the christians just happened to coincide with a time of great upheaval that enabled them to thrive rather than die out as a purely jewish sect.
That having been said that he existed doesn't mean everything writen about him afterward wasn't complete bull made up from half remembered stories or just plainly lied about by the early church in order to up jesus and make him more saleable to converts, converts that, even then, represented money and power.