If you’d like to believe the crank web site in your first cite, that’s your business, there’s a plethora of errors in their account but the only way you’d be able to recognize them would be to spend some time becoming familiar with the original sources and learning to read the apparatus in the critical text, which I don’t really recommend as something to do with your time, esp. given how unimportant the topic really is (“Jesus: complete fiction or almost entirely fiction?”). There actually is an interesting problem in the second article (which also has serious errors but is more informed). Given that I’ve already specifically discussed the caveat your first article is blundering, I know you’re not actually reading what I’m saying, and it’s clear you don’t have any familiarity with the texts you’re googling critiques of, this is definitely not worth my time. Proclaim the Jesus Myther position to your heart’s content. I’ve had my say and am now done.
Santa Claus is based on a real person, but his near divinic properties and love of Coke are unsubstantiated by the earliest and most reliable documentation we have of Saint Nicholas.
Time-travelling Michael Moorcock strikes again!
Prove it.
I’ve eaten some of his salad!
Every time I measure the sugar in my wine grapes withy refractometer I see Plato, so that’s covered as well.
Really? I thought he just made modeling clay.
Hopefully you tossed it first.
It was worth your time, and you said your say very well. Future readers of this thread thank you.
But it’s not worth any more of your time!
Those aren’t your only two choices, you can also think that they are a combination and amalgamation of older stories, borrowed/altered/changed repeatedly as is common in cultures with both oral history and oral story telling traditions. Even the Romans rebooted the Greek gods. It was kinda the thing to do at the time in that part of the world. We know this is is already the case for many stories from the bible, take the flood myth for example.
No conspiracy, that is how stories get created passed down generation to generation, and changed to fit the times and place to make the relevant. It is an essential part of human culture.
I’ve eaten some of his clay!
He is the fun God.
He is the Sun God.
Ra! Ra! Ra!
Some gods are just so loki…
You’re right. I considered breaking that into a more complete account though given that I know I’m not good with brevity, and it’s hard it is for me to be terse I went with a simplification in an effort at mercy. But I’ll ramble now. In this case we’ve got a fairly short window of time with a surprisingly large amount of almost semi-reliable documentation, and a few bits of more reliable documentation, both internal and external that hint at how events unfolded, so while we can’t say with certainty how the myths of the early Church formed, they didn’t appear the way myths did in preliterate societies. While the texts are really challenging to gauge reliability of, blanket dismissal is just hiding from evidence. Those blanket denials of documents evidence seem to either be coming from an unwillingness to do the work a complicated analysis of those documents entails or from a motive of proving some alternate theory that there’s no evidence for where the claimed lack of evidence is used to prove a conspiracy.
In this case the best general account I know of that fits the data we have is that there was some rabbi who caused some a kind of a stir and was executed, some loyalists to his teachings persisted after his death, those loyalists began mythologizing the rabbi, then Saul/Paul came along shortly thereafter, hooked up with the early followers, and invented a new religion that was an amalgam of the weird ideas of that early group with his more Roman mystery-religion style things. That’s still a little controversial, but it’s the better than any alternatives I’ve read.
While many letters in the NT are later inventions, and some strongly appear to have been corrupted, there’s still a nicely documented struggle between Peter and his Jewish followers who were carrying on some kind of Jewish traditionalism that was much more orthodox and Paul who was busy converting gentiles and inventing a new religion. There’s about 30 years between the guy dying, the big internal drama playing out, then Peter’s execution that’s described by Josephus. There’s plenty of excellent reasons to doubt doubt the religious claptrap in the documents, very good reasons to doubt everything but the broadest outlines in the stories in the synoptics, and complex reasons to doubt some of the epistles, but there’s still good reasons to assume some epistles were an account of an early Church going through a really bizarre transition from a semi-orthodox Jewish eschatological cult to a Roman mystery cult. The fight between Peter and Paul on circumcision encapsulate that drama pretty well.
The fact that we have a few of these weird and alienating documents that show fractious bickering actually lend more authenticity, since they don’t serve the mythology at all. The sheer amount of weirdness, alienating and unflattering details, and descriptions of childish internal fights that really make no sense unless there were some events they were based on. Nobody would be stupid enough to invent that if they were trying to gain followers.
Looking at each document seriously in the context of linguistic analysis, internal consistency, historical consistency, and the ideas presented is tedious as hell, and I wouldn’t suggest it to anyone (I read bits of the texts in a critical analysis and looked into bits of the critical apparatus, but hated it). But unless you suffer through that crap you’re not going to be able to make an informed case for what to dismiss or whether to dismiss it all. I can’t do that, and am very glad that I don’t really care, but as a result I do assume that there’s some validity to some documents since making a strong and well reasoned case that there’s none is way harder that it might seem at first, and the safest assumption is that the documents are a tedious and confused mush, but a mush based on an early church forming after their leader died.
Where the fuck is Mumm-Ra? I have no faith in this chart!
No Sobek?
This is blasphemous 
Jesus rose from the dead on a Sunday
Jesus is the fun god
Jesus is the Sun god. 
Jeeeeeesussssss 
I’m not sure why Boing Boing is now Kemetic-central.
I like the basket Min’s holding to hide his… attribute.
