I think the thing always worth bearing in mind about mythicism is that any claims about the reality of history tend to be on a bit of an epistolomologically poor footing to begin with because they essentially involve playing a giant game of detective with surviving artifacts and documents and attempting to reconstruct the past by guesswork and deduction - claims about the past are inherently a matter of sorting through circumstantial evidence. Historical events are not repeatable the way any modern scientific field of inquiry is, nor are they able to be personally experienced by anyone living, so we can't 'know' about them the way we can 'know' about things like lights or cars or people we've met, we can just make guesses on balances of probability and attempt to reconstruct the past as best we can. We can guess that Jesus probably existed, and we can guess that he was probably seen by his immediate followers as a miracle worker. But those are, ultimately, guesses based on surviving evidence.
God might have actually created the world 100 years ago and it just looks like history happened beforehand, or maybe earth is a zoo exhibit for aliens and the aliens have carefully put some faked artifacts and books in our exhibit to see how we respond to them and what historical narrative we construct for ourselves about them, or maybe historians have made some major errors in their reconstruction of ancient history and the entirety of what we know about classical Greece was a creation of the Romans, or maybe there was a successful attempt by a powerful group within the Christian church to rewrite history and certain way and destroy anything that contravened their preferred view of history and create fake documents to support their version of it. Because history as a discipline lacks the repeatability of science or the personal-experience of everyday life, we can never truly prove that none of these sorts of things happened. People who are historians are in the business of trying to play that detective game and separate the more likely from the less likely. They're generally operating within the paradigm of assuming that history is real and hasn't been substantially faked. And their opinion generally seems to be that on the balance of probability, using the kind of levels of evidence historians usually accept for the existence of historical figures, Jesus existed.
But even assuming the general truth of history itself, the nonexistence of Jesus isn't all that hard to hypothesize. Let's imagine Christianity started a cult lead by the 12 disciples. It would have been one of dozens of religious movements in Israel around that time, as the fervently religious Jews sought answers to how their God was allowing them to suffer oppression at the hands of the Romans and they were hoping for divine deliverance. Let's imagine that this group of 12, like many shamans in many cultures around the world, liked to inhale/smoke/eat various substances that allowed them to "see into the spirit world". After their trips into the spirit world they would discuss among themselves what they had seen and the meaning of it. They came to believe that in the spirit world they had met with God's Messiah, Jesus, and that he had taught them many things. As the cult expanded, the 12 began to lose control of its teachings, as more and more of the followers saw Jesus in the spirit world and reported what he taught them, and the group began to clash extensively with the more 'orthodox' Pharisees. The Romans, who irregularly cracked down on Jewish radical groups, moved against the Christians at the behest of the Pharisees, crucifying many of the members and scattering the rest. Perhaps one of the members of the Christian cult who happened to be named Jesus (a very common name among Jews of the time) was selected by the Romans to represent the group's spiritual messiah Jesus and was singled out for particular punishment and crucifixion so as to symbolically slay the spiritual Jesus, or perhaps the surviving scattered remnants of the Christian cult came to believe through further spiritual visions that the spiritual Jesus had been spiritually on a cross alongside their own martyred friends.
As the cult regrouped and recovered from this attack by the Romans, several members and then a bunch saw Jesus again when they entered the spirit world and believed his had returned to life after being slain by the Romans. Shortly afterward, one of the pharisees persecuting the cult, Saul/Paul, had a seizure and dreamed he saw a vision of the spiritual Jesus himself while recovering from it. He became very active in promoting the teachings of this group he had previously opposed. Meanwhile the teachings of Jesus began to circulate among new members of the group. When the teachings were finally written down a generation later some of the sub-sects of Christianity now saw Jesus as a real man who had lived in the real world rather than a spiritual being, although many of the sub-sects of Christianity retained their 'gnostic' heritage of a spiritual Jesus and their versions of the gospels reflect that, and the disagreements between the two types of Christians on this general topic would remain quite bitter for more than a century. The Jesus-was-real version eventually won-out as 'orthodox' and as a result a lot of the gnostic writings were lost, with much of what we know about them coming from 'orthodox' writers who wrote vehemently against the gnostic's teachings and from what few copies of a few versions of gnostic gospels have happened to survive over the millennia.
God might have actually created the world 100 years ago and it just looks like history happened beforehand, or maybe earth is a zoo exhibit for aliens and the aliens have carefully put some faked artifacts and books in our exhibit to see how we respond to them and what historical narrative we construct for ourselves about them, or maybe historians have made some major errors in their reconstruction of ancient history and the entirety of what we know about classical Greece was a creation of the Romans, or maybe there was a successful attempt by a powerful group within the Christian church to rewrite history and certain way and destroy anything that contravened their preferred view of history and create fake documents to support their version of it. Because history as a discipline lacks the repeatability of science or the personal-experience of everyday life, we can never truly prove that none of these sorts of things happened. People who are historians are in the business of trying to play that detective game and separate the more likely from the less likely. They're generally operating within the paradigm of assuming that history is real and hasn't been substantially faked. And their opinion generally seems to be that on the balance of probability, using the kind of levels of evidence historians usually accept for the existence of historical figures, Jesus existed.
But even assuming the general truth of history itself, the nonexistence of Jesus isn't all that hard to hypothesize. Let's imagine Christianity started a cult lead by the 12 disciples. It would have been one of dozens of religious movements in Israel around that time, as the fervently religious Jews sought answers to how their God was allowing them to suffer oppression at the hands of the Romans and they were hoping for divine deliverance. Let's imagine that this group of 12, like many shamans in many cultures around the world, liked to inhale/smoke/eat various substances that allowed them to "see into the spirit world". After their trips into the spirit world they would discuss among themselves what they had seen and the meaning of it. They came to believe that in the spirit world they had met with God's Messiah, Jesus, and that he had taught them many things. As the cult expanded, the 12 began to lose control of its teachings, as more and more of the followers saw Jesus in the spirit world and reported what he taught them, and the group began to clash extensively with the more 'orthodox' Pharisees. The Romans, who irregularly cracked down on Jewish radical groups, moved against the Christians at the behest of the Pharisees, crucifying many of the members and scattering the rest. Perhaps one of the members of the Christian cult who happened to be named Jesus (a very common name among Jews of the time) was selected by the Romans to represent the group's spiritual messiah Jesus and was singled out for particular punishment and crucifixion so as to symbolically slay the spiritual Jesus, or perhaps the surviving scattered remnants of the Christian cult came to believe through further spiritual visions that the spiritual Jesus had been spiritually on a cross alongside their own martyred friends.
As the cult regrouped and recovered from this attack by the Romans, several members and then a bunch saw Jesus again when they entered the spirit world and believed his had returned to life after being slain by the Romans. Shortly afterward, one of the pharisees persecuting the cult, Saul/Paul, had a seizure and dreamed he saw a vision of the spiritual Jesus himself while recovering from it. He became very active in promoting the teachings of this group he had previously opposed. Meanwhile the teachings of Jesus began to circulate among new members of the group. When the teachings were finally written down a generation later some of the sub-sects of Christianity now saw Jesus as a real man who had lived in the real world rather than a spiritual being, although many of the sub-sects of Christianity retained their 'gnostic' heritage of a spiritual Jesus and their versions of the gospels reflect that, and the disagreements between the two types of Christians on this general topic would remain quite bitter for more than a century. The Jesus-was-real version eventually won-out as 'orthodox' and as a result a lot of the gnostic writings were lost, with much of what we know about them coming from 'orthodox' writers who wrote vehemently against the gnostic's teachings and from what few copies of a few versions of gnostic gospels have happened to survive over the millennia.
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