The Jesus Myth: An unrelenting case for history

[Res Ipsa]

Stem, how do the parallels you cite support the conclusion that the mythical divine Christ wholly invented as opposed to being a mythologized real person?

It's a good question but I find it a little bit odd considering all that we have. In this thread I've limited Jesus' history stories to Paul and Mark (those that come after Mrak are quite positively dependent sources). So we have a Jesus in Paul wherein Paul only very rarely and ambiguously gives hints that maybe Jesus lived before him. But I'd question each of those rare mentions, wondering if any of them are explicit enough to overcome the mythicist hypothesis, or to really support the notion of historicity. But Mark's story clearly and without equivocation claims Jesus lived. That's where we read of the claim. If we read with some degree of skepticism as we should, as I see it, then how do we support Mark's claim? If Mark's own claim pretends to render many themes and stories from all previous myths well known amongst his Roman/Greek upbringing, then how do we even take seriously that his story is history? Or that his characters were real people? Did he mean it as such? Interestingly there is a mystery element added to Mark. he mentions a couple of times that the story he's writing, and the gospel he's pushing was not supposed to be told to anyone (Mark 9:9, Mark 7:36, Mark 1:44-45 5:42-43, Mark 16:8). Surely the mystery element all by itself doesn't do justice to the claim that there was no Jesus, but its not like it's against such a notion. Additionally, it's apparent to some, and I find the arguments pretty persuasive that Mark had reliance on at least some portion of Paul's letters. Additionally as previous threads and discussions have demonstrated, it is quite likely that the anonymous author of Mark had a community among other greek literal elites and was writing creatively to impress his community. That'd be how he would have been able to get his writings circulated to any extent. He'd have to impress his immediate audience--his community. There's little reason to think he wrote his account on the back of oral stories passed around to his ears. That's guesswork. It could have happened. It just seems less likely given things like Mark's stories all have familiarity in content and wording as many greek and Roman myths that were commonly held. The stories continue to be reminiscent of previous stories (MacDonald has, of course, far more in his works then the few I mentioned here), and there's nothing to suggest the stories found in Mark are history.

On the whole the idea that Mark rendered previous hero and god myths in order to bolster his own character, doesn't necessarily suggest Jesus never lived. It simply becomes more likely considering all the other elements that we ought to consider.

Why do you expect that there would not be parallels to other mythical figures if the myth of the divine Christ were based on a real guy named Jesus?

It may or may not be expected. Alexander was mythologized, and given divine status in such mythologies. There are similiarities, i know. But there is also one ton of evidence demonstrating Alexander actually lived, which is clearly not the case for Jesus. On Jesus' case it seems more reasonable to give an "I don't know" and leaving at some level of probability then to say "he must have lived".

Let us consider this scenario. In 2,000 years there happens to be, we'll say, a Spiderman religion dominant among many in the world. All of the comics and stories we have are erased. But in history, all we have from the year 2012 is a writing, we'll say, from a man in China (Named Nthan) who wrote letters in Chinese to some unknown others in various places around the world--a letter to Zimbabwean believers, some in Kazakhstan, Australia etc. Nathan's letters do not explicitly say Spiderman, who is Peter Parker, lived. They give ambiguous hints he may have. But another, some decades after Nathan, wrote what many consider a history of Peter Parker who is the Spiderman. Peter had parents, and an aunt (?) who raised him. He lived in NYC and saved people from enemies. He magically did many things. And we'll say in some measure of analogy, the story included many elements that were comparable to, derived from, other Chinese myths. Same language was used to detail stories of his life that would be considered popular among Chinese people today. I won't pretend to get too detailed there to drive the point home, because I'm sure we all get the picture. But in this scenario it may be likely most believers over the next 2,000 years think there really was, at bottom, a Peter Parker who started the religion.

Are we saying now that it would be reasonable for believers in spiderman to think Peter Parker was a real living person in 2,000 years from now? I would say, no. They'd need something way better than what they have. Sure, Peter Parker could have been someone. The name is quite common--the last and the first. No doubt many people who have lived in NYC had the name, over, say, the past 100 years. The story could be based on any one of the Peter Parkers. But sadly, those 2,000 years from now have nothing to detail any particular Peter Parker who may have started the religion.

This seems basically parallel to what we have for Jesus. If Jesus was some run-of-mill apocalyptic preacher who no one noticed because there were others, but somehow managed to start a religion, make enough noise to get himself killed by authorities...so be it. But we have no evidence for any of that. Just as Spiderman believers 2,000 years from now have no evidence for a real Peter Parker who started the religion they presumably would hold so dear.

This is one of those things I suspect we'll disagree about and move on. Thinking like a Bayesian, my question is should the existence of these parallels affect our prior probability. If you have to appeal to your prior to argue that the new evidence changes the prior, the answer is clearly "no." The parallelism argument should be discarded as irrelevant.

[dastardly stem]

Exactly. This is what we find in the different gospels. Jesus’ character is morphed differently in each according to the needs of the audience the writer is writing for.

Also, the idea of objective history itself is a relatively modern invention. There are plenty of people we are fairly sure existed back then with about as much documentation as Christ.

This is pretty much a non-point as I see it. Yes, we just assume people mentioned in history lived. But if we take any one of them and examine if they ever lived, as a serious question, then we have to seriously take the data and determine the likelihood, on living or not. It may mean we have very little grounding, ultimately, to say certain people really lived or not, but that doesn't matter. It's a serious evaluation. And if we're going to treat history as a serious discipline we have to be consistent and respectful of it's tools. That's a big part of what this is about, as I see it.

Then you have the wealth of surviving manuscripts. Historians say there is nothing like that much evidence for anything else of that time period. The gospels were incredibly important, and became so incredibly quickly.

The manuscripts all come much later then the writings themselves. I think it's fine to say that the stories themselves, as we have them, are largely what was originally written, even if we can know that for sure, all based on the loads of manuscript data. But none of the speaks to the reliability of the stories themselves. This point is largely a red herring.

That’s why I think the burden of proof is on the mythesist position.

The burdens largely been met. There is no serious work in scholarship that's come out in the recent years detailing a case for historicity. There has been works accomplishing that for mythicism, as we term it. There has been some really minor and paltry efforts to review the scholarly works, but as I see them, they are largely ineffective. So as it stands now, historicity has a burden. It needs to join the scholarly conversation. And I think it'll happen one of these days, perhap not in the too distant future. But for now, people seem to be steering away from the topic, poking at it with a 100 foot poll every so often in hopes they don't need to address it. I don't know why exactly, but it may have something to do with the large old elephant in the room known as the dominant religion trying to flex its Mickey Mouse arms.

[PseudoPaul]

Exactly. This is what we find in the different gospels. Jesus’ character is morphed differently in each according to the needs of the audience the writer is writing for.

Also, the idea of objective history itself is a relatively modern invention. There are plenty of people we are fairly sure existed back then with about as much documentation as Christ.

This is pretty much a non-point as I see it. Yes, we just assume people mentioned in history lived. But if we take any one of them and examine if they ever lived, as a serious question, then we have to seriously take the data and determine the likelihood, on living or not. It may mean we have very little grounding, ultimately, to say certain people really lived or not, but that doesn't matter. It's a serious evaluation. And if we're going to treat history as a serious discipline we have to be consistent and respectful of it's tools. That's a big part of what this is about, as I see it.

Then you have the wealth of surviving manuscripts. Historians say there is nothing like that much evidence for anything else of that time period. The gospels were incredibly important, and became so incredibly quickly.

The manuscripts all come much later then the writings themselves. I think it's fine to say that the stories themselves, as we have them, are largely what was originally written, even if we can know that for sure, all based on the loads of manuscript data. But none of the speaks to the reliability of the stories themselves. This point is largely a red herring.

That’s why I think the burden of proof is on the mythesist position.

The burdens largely been met. There is no serious work in scholarship that's come out in the recent years detailing a case for historicity. There has been works accomplishing that for mythicism, as we term it. There has been some really minor and paltry efforts to review the scholarly works, but as I see them, they are largely ineffective. So as it stands now, historicity has a burden. It needs to join the scholarly conversation. And I think it'll happen one of these days, perhap not in the too distant future. But for now, people seem to be steering away from the topic, poking at it with a 100 foot poll every so often in hopes they don't need to address it. I don't know why exactly, but it may have something to do with the large old elephant in the room known as the dominant religion trying to flex its Mickey Mouse arms.

You've got it exactly backwards. The vast majority of New Testament scholars agree that there is a historical person behind the Jesus in the gospels, although the self-identity and history of that person is very different from what the evangelists portray.

Mythicists are just a few cranks on the fringes of academia who have yet to deal effectively with the historical evidence for Jesus of Nazareth. It's flat earther conspiracy theory nonsense.

[drumdude]

Bart Ehrman maintains a blog where he continues to respond to the mythesist position:

Gospel Evidence that Jesus Existed

October 28, 2016
Jesus existed. In yesterday’s post, I began to show how Jesus is the best attested Palestinian Jew of the first century if we look only at external evidence. Josephus is better attested because we have his own writings. I am also not including Paul because I’m talking only about Jews from Palestine; he was from the Diaspora.

The Gospel Sources
We have four narrative accounts of Jesus’ life and death, written by different people at different times and in different places, based on numerous sources that no longer survive. Jesus was not invented by Mark. He was also known to Matthew, Luke, and John, and to the sources which they used (Q, M, L, and the various sources of John).

All of this was within the first century.

Non-New Testament & Non-Gospel Sources – We Have Many!
This is not to mention sources from outside the New Testament that know that Jesus was a historical figure – for example, 1 Clement and the documents that make up the Didache. Or — need I say it? – every other author of the New Testament (there are sixteen New Testament authors altogether, so twelve who did not write Gospels), none of whom knew any of the Gospels (except for the author of 1, 2, and 3 John who may have known the fourth Gospel).

By my count that’s something like twenty-five authors, not counting the authors of the sources (another six or seven) on which the Gospels were based (and the sources on which the book of Acts was based, which were different again).

How We Know Jesus Wasn’t “Made Up”
If there had been one source of Christian antiquity that mentioned a historical Jesus (e.g., Mark) and everyone else was based on what that source had to say, then possibly you could argue that this person made Jesus up and everyone else simply took the ball and ran with it.

But …

But how can you make a convincing case if we’re talking about thirty or so independent sources that know there was a man Jesus? These sources are not all living in the same village someplace so they are egging each other on. They didn’t compare notes. They are independent of one another and are scattered throughout the Mediterranean. They each have heard about the man Jesus from their own sources of information, which heard about him from their own sources of information.

That must mean that there were hundreds of people at the least who were talking about the man Jesus. One of them was the apostle Paul, who was talking about Jesus by at least the year 32 CE, that is, two years after the date of Jesus’ death.

Paul, as I will point out, actually knew, personally, Jesus’ own brother James and his closest disciples Peter and John. That’s more or less a death knell for the Mythicist position, as some of them admit. I’ll get to Paul in a subsequent note. Here I am simply stressing that the Gospel traditions themselves provide clear evidence that Jesus was being talked about just a few years after his life in Roman Palestine.

Unlock Over 4000 Articles on Ehrman Blog

Linguistic Evidence
There is more. Good evidence shows that some of the Gospel accounts clearly go back to traditions about Jesus in circulation, originally, in Aramaic, the language of Roman Palestine, where Jesus himself lived. One piece of evidence is that Aramaic words occasionally appear in stories about Jesus, often at the climactic moment. This happens in a variety of stories from a variety of sources. For example, In Mark 5 Jesus raises the daughter of a man named Jairus from the dead. When he comes into her room and raises her, he says to her “Talitha cumi.” The author of Mark translates for us: “Little girl, arise.”

Why would the author leave the key sentence in Aramaic? If you have ever had bi-lingual friends who assume you too know their second language and have heard them tell a joke about something that happened in the other country, you will know that sometimes they give the punch line in the other language, even though the lead up to the line is in English. That’s because often the punch line packs a better punch than the original.

I had a professor who used to do that with us as graduate students about something that had happened to him in Germany. It used to drive us nuts because even though we were able to read German, we weren’t fluent, and half the time we didn’t know what he was saying. We laughed heartily, though, since there’s no way on God’s green earth we were going to let on that we couldn’t follow German…..

This story about Jairus’s daughter, then, was originally told in Aramaic and was later translated into Greek, with the key line left in the original. So too with several stories in a completely different Gospel, the Gospel of John. It happens three times in just 1:35-42. This is a story that circulated in Aramaic-speaking Palestine, the homeland of Jesus and his disciples.

Traditions Stemming from Aramaic
The other reason for knowing that a tradition was originally in Aramaic is because it makes better sense when translated *back* into Aramaic than it does in Greek.

My favorite illustration of this is Jesus’ famous saying: “Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath; therefore the Son of Man is the Lord of the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27-28). The context: Jesus’ disciples have been eating grain from a field on the Sabbath day; the Pharisees object, and Jesus explains that it is permissible to meet human needs on the Sabbath. Then his clever one-liner.

But the one-liner doesn’t make sense. Why would the Son of Man (Jesus) be Lord of the Sabbath BECAUSE Sabbath was made for humans, not the other way around? In other words, when he says “therefore” the Son of Man is the Lord of the Sabbath, what is the “therefore” there for?

The logic doesn’t work in Greek (or English). But it would work in Aramaic. That’s because in Aramaic the word for “man” and the word for “son of man” are the same word: “Bar enash” (could be translated either way). And so what Jesus said was: “Sabbath was made for bar enash, not bar enash for the Sabbath; therefore bar enash is lord of the Sabbath.” Now it makes sense. The saying was originally transmitted in Aramaic, and when translated into Greek, the translator decided to make the final statement about Jesus, not about humans.

For more about Jesus’ teaching in Aramaic, please see this article.

Reality Check: Jesus Existed
Christianity did not make a big impact on Aramaic-speaking Palestine. The vast majority of Jews in the homeland did not accept Christianity or want anything to do with it. There were not thousands of storytellers there passing on Christian traditions. There were some, of course, especially in Jerusalem.

But the fact that these stories based on Aramaic are scattered throughout our sources suggests that they were in circulation relatively early in the tradition. Most of these are thought to go back to the early decade or two (probably the earliest decade) of transmission. You cannot argue that Jesus was made up by some Greek-speaking Christian after Paul’s letters, for example.

Short story: we are not talking about a Bart Ehrman Jesus figure invented in the year 60. There was widespread information about Jesus from the years after his death. Otherwise, you can’t explain all the literary evidence (dozens of independent sources), some of it based on Aramaic traditions of Jesus’ homeland. But there’s more evidence that clinches the case. I’ll be talking about that in later posts.

To say there has been no response is simply incorrect.

[dastardly stem]

This is one of those things I suspect we'll disagree about and move on. Thinking like a Bayesian, my question is should the existence of these parallels affect our prior probability. If you have to appeal to your prior to argue that the new evidence changes the prior, the answer is clearly "no." The parallelism argument should be discarded as irrelevant.

Yeah...I like continual disagreement being acknowledged. I got your question and I answered, to be clear, "it may or may not be expected", which I took as saying no.

ALlow me to clarify the point of mentioning the parallels. Mark's story represents the claim for historicity. We have to inspect the claim by confirming it with other evidence. If we have no other credible evidence supporting Mark's story, then we have nothing to put into the weight for historicity. So it may be that we have no weight added to mythicism. The point is there is no historicity data to tip the scales.

My mythicism is near 50/50. That is to say probability-wise I'd say its nearly as likely Jesus lived as did not live. I just happen to think the scales tip slightly in the direction of not existing.

To me there's plenty to discuss and agree upon here...but I'm happy if you wish to leave it as agree to disagree ultimately.

[dastardly stem]

You've got it exactly backwards. The vast majority of New Testament scholars agree that there is a historical person behind the Jesus in the gospels, although the self-identity and history of that person is very different from what the evangelists portray.

Mythicists are just a few cranks on the fringes of academia who have yet to deal effectively with the historical evidence for Jesus of Nazareth. It's flat earther conspiracy theory nonsense.

Nah...you misunderstand the situation. It may be that if we surveyed all scholars who could be said to be included as having relevant work related in some way to this topic of historical studies about Jesus or the religion, we'd see the majority say Jesus really did live. But, of course, most of those would be Christians anyway (this in fact highlights the big problem with that Habermas guy's work). The problem with that is we have no idea if these scholars have fairly evaluated the question or the data or the scholarly arguments. Its just opinion that may or may not have credible backing. But...if we survey the scholarship--the works being produced by scholars under the rubric of peer review--we see the majority of such scholarship to be mythicism. Historicity needs to enter the arena of these ideas. I think it will one of these days. Until then, I'm happy to concede many scholars assume historicity.

[dastardly stem]

Bart Ehrman maintains a blog where he continues to respond to the mythesist position:

Gospel Evidence that Jesus Existed

October 28, 2016
Jesus existed. In yesterday’s post, I began to show how Jesus is the best attested Palestinian Jew of the first century if we look only at external evidence. Josephus is better attested because we have his own writings. I am also not including Paul because I’m talking only about Jews from Palestine; he was from the Diaspora.

The Gospel Sources
We have four narrative accounts of Jesus’ life and death, written by different people at different times and in different places, based on numerous sources that no longer survive. Jesus was not invented by Mark. He was also known to Matthew, Luke, and John, and to the sources which they used (Q, M, L, and the various sources of John).

All of this was within the first century.

Non-New Testament & Non-Gospel Sources – We Have Many!
This is not to mention sources from outside the New Testament that know that Jesus was a historical figure – for example, 1 Clement and the documents that make up the Didache. Or — need I say it? – every other author of the New Testament (there are sixteen New Testament authors altogether, so twelve who did not write Gospels), none of whom knew any of the Gospels (except for the author of 1, 2, and 3 John who may have known the fourth Gospel).

By my count that’s something like twenty-five authors, not counting the authors of the sources (another six or seven) on which the Gospels were based (and the sources on which the book of Acts was based, which were different again).

How We Know Jesus Wasn’t “Made Up”
If there had been one source of Christian antiquity that mentioned a historical Jesus (e.g., Mark) and everyone else was based on what that source had to say, then possibly you could argue that this person made Jesus up and everyone else simply took the ball and ran with it.

But …

But how can you make a convincing case if we’re talking about thirty or so independent sources that know there was a man Jesus? These sources are not all living in the same village someplace so they are egging each other on. They didn’t compare notes. They are independent of one another and are scattered throughout the Mediterranean. They each have heard about the man Jesus from their own sources of information, which heard about him from their own sources of information.

That must mean that there were hundreds of people at the least who were talking about the man Jesus. One of them was the apostle Paul, who was talking about Jesus by at least the year 32 CE, that is, two years after the date of Jesus’ death.

Paul, as I will point out, actually knew, personally, Jesus’ own brother James and his closest disciples Peter and John. That’s more or less a death knell for the Mythicist position, as some of them admit. I’ll get to Paul in a subsequent note. Here I am simply stressing that the Gospel traditions themselves provide clear evidence that Jesus was being talked about just a few years after his life in Roman Palestine.

Unlock Over 4000 Articles on Ehrman Blog

Linguistic Evidence
There is more. Good evidence shows that some of the Gospel accounts clearly go back to traditions about Jesus in circulation, originally, in Aramaic, the language of Roman Palestine, where Jesus himself lived. One piece of evidence is that Aramaic words occasionally appear in stories about Jesus, often at the climactic moment. This happens in a variety of stories from a variety of sources. For example, In Mark 5 Jesus raises the daughter of a man named Jairus from the dead. When he comes into her room and raises her, he says to her “Talitha cumi.” The author of Mark translates for us: “Little girl, arise.”

Why would the author leave the key sentence in Aramaic? If you have ever had bi-lingual friends who assume you too know their second language and have heard them tell a joke about something that happened in the other country, you will know that sometimes they give the punch line in the other language, even though the lead up to the line is in English. That’s because often the punch line packs a better punch than the original.

I had a professor who used to do that with us as graduate students about something that had happened to him in Germany. It used to drive us nuts because even though we were able to read German, we weren’t fluent, and half the time we didn’t know what he was saying. We laughed heartily, though, since there’s no way on God’s green earth we were going to let on that we couldn’t follow German…..

This story about Jairus’s daughter, then, was originally told in Aramaic and was later translated into Greek, with the key line left in the original. So too with several stories in a completely different Gospel, the Gospel of John. It happens three times in just 1:35-42. This is a story that circulated in Aramaic-speaking Palestine, the homeland of Jesus and his disciples.

Traditions Stemming from Aramaic
The other reason for knowing that a tradition was originally in Aramaic is because it makes better sense when translated *back* into Aramaic than it does in Greek.

My favorite illustration of this is Jesus’ famous saying: “Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath; therefore the Son of Man is the Lord of the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27-28). The context: Jesus’ disciples have been eating grain from a field on the Sabbath day; the Pharisees object, and Jesus explains that it is permissible to meet human needs on the Sabbath. Then his clever one-liner.

But the one-liner doesn’t make sense. Why would the Son of Man (Jesus) be Lord of the Sabbath BECAUSE Sabbath was made for humans, not the other way around? In other words, when he says “therefore” the Son of Man is the Lord of the Sabbath, what is the “therefore” there for?

The logic doesn’t work in Greek (or English). But it would work in Aramaic. That’s because in Aramaic the word for “man” and the word for “son of man” are the same word: “Bar enash” (could be translated either way). And so what Jesus said was: “Sabbath was made for bar enash, not bar enash for the Sabbath; therefore bar enash is lord of the Sabbath.” Now it makes sense. The saying was originally transmitted in Aramaic, and when translated into Greek, the translator decided to make the final statement about Jesus, not about humans.

For more about Jesus’ teaching in Aramaic, please see this article.

Reality Check: Jesus Existed
Christianity did not make a big impact on Aramaic-speaking Palestine. The vast majority of Jews in the homeland did not accept Christianity or want anything to do with it. There were not thousands of storytellers there passing on Christian traditions. There were some, of course, especially in Jerusalem.

But the fact that these stories based on Aramaic are scattered throughout our sources suggests that they were in circulation relatively early in the tradition. Most of these are thought to go back to the early decade or two (probably the earliest decade) of transmission. You cannot argue that Jesus was made up by some Greek-speaking Christian after Paul’s letters, for example.

Short story: we are not talking about a Bart Ehrman Jesus figure invented in the year 60. There was widespread information about Jesus from the years after his death. Otherwise, you can’t explain all the literary evidence (dozens of independent sources), some of it based on Aramaic traditions of Jesus’ homeland. But there’s more evidence that clinches the case. I’ll be talking about that in later posts.

To say there has been no response is simply incorrect.

You've misunderstood my point. Bart's blog is not scholarship. It's not peer reviewed or anything of the sort. But...I will add, on this forum, I reviewed Bart's book (also not scholarship but written as a popular book) on the topic and linked that thread in the OP here. His is a terrible case. And of course it's not scholarship. Also to the point, none of the above addresses the case for mythicism, at least not the peer reviewed case for such. So i wouldn't say he's engaged the topic.

[dastardly stem]

Something I overlooked a bit, but wanted to comment a little more on...Failed Prophet suggested MacDonald's work is comparable to Nibley. Res Ipsa agreed. I'm surprised by this. I can't figure out how exactly there is much of a similarity. Nibley points to vague allusions of roughly similar sounding ideas from peoples of ancient Isarel, Mesopotamia, Egypt etc to demonstrate that the Book of Abraham or Mormon could possibly be said to be inspired. That is Nibley wished to demonstrate modern books are from God because he can point to really tenuous sounding parallels from ancient times found in roughly the region and time Joseph Smith's works should be found. That's not at all similar to what MacDonald had been doing.

MacDonald has detailed many many pieces of quoted material, and similar stories with quoted terms and phrases from works that predominated educated Roman and Greek circles from which the New Testament writings emerged in the first century CE and somehow to these yahoos (jk guys just playing along a little) suggest MacDonald's work should be mocked as Nibley-esque?

Its laughable. But I figure the silliness of this ought to be highlighted in hopes people take modern scholarship a bit more seriously.

[Manetho]

But I figure the silliness of this ought to be highlighted in hopes people take modern scholarship a bit more seriously.

I think I read that MacDonald himself believes Jesus actually existed. M. David Litwa, another scholar who says studies of the gospels should engage more with Greek mythology, also believes Jesus actually existed. (According to this response to one of his books, "Litwa’s contention that the gospels are myths made to look historical will initially be met with gasps of excitement and anticipation by the online Jesus mythicist community — and their gasps of joy will dissipate just as quickly once they realise that Litwa himself is not a Jesus mythicist, but believes in a historical Jesus.")

So, as I said in my post upthread, it's entirely plausible that multiple mythic elements could be applied to a historical person. And that still seems to be what most scholars believe happened with Jesus.

[dastardly stem]

I agree stem, it would be helpful to know what the basic timeline of your hypothesis is. Who started it, who created what and why, ect.

This is the key thing. I can give you what I consider a probable reconstruction of how Christianity emerged, including a (very rough) timeline for the process and, especially, the motivations of the people who formed it. (I'm not writing it out now, though I can if people are interested.) Although I'm not steeped in studies of the historical Jesus, I think my outline generally fits with what a lot of those scholars think. Your hypothesis, Stem, looks pretty vague — similarities are one thing, but you don't say much about who created the myth, why they did so, or when.

So....I'm suggesting Paul was the first to write about Jesus. Mark was second, in the historical record. They both were diaspora Jews, steeped in Greek and Roman thought. There is no clear evidence that either of them got stories or material from anyone else regarding who Jesus was or what he should be. Indeed, the vague description by Paul is James and Peter believed in him previous to Paul, but when Paul met up with them, he found himself disappointed in what they had to offer. it may very well be their Jesus was quite a bit different from his Jesus. The contention was, apparently, Paul wanted others to convert. Peter wanted to convert Jews. But we get no word from Peter or James, so we don't know what they thought. I would suggest there was a weak or raw version of Paul's later version floating among some illiterate people in jerusalem, and perhaps minimally in regions nearby. But what that was might not really have been quite as coherent as what Paul tried to preach, nor what Mark later wrote. Its all very sketchy history, but that'd be part of the point. Its not neat and tidy. The guesswork can be near infinite, if we let it.

My other objection is that comparisons to polytheistic beliefs are actually viable — as you say, Judaism was far from free of Hellenistic influence — but the similarities don't necessarily indicate that Jesus was purely mythical. There are certainly myths about non-historical deities and culture heroes with elements similar to the Christian traditions about Jesus: Osiris, Heracles, Romulus, and so on. But those deities and culture heroes were figures who were thought to have existed in the prehistoric or protohistoric past, and the myths about them emerged long before the Hellenistic Period, let alone that of the Roman Empire. But during Hellenistic and Roman times, those same myth-like tropes were applied to historical people. Plato, Alexander, Augustus, and Apollonius of Tyana were all said to have been fathered by gods. Julius Caesar, Augustus, and Apollonius were said to have become divine or risen to heaven upon death. The age-old mythic tropes were applied to real, historical people to demonstrate that these people were divine.

Good points. I do not object to the idea that Jesus really lived based on this. It could be either way--there was a jesus or there was not and the same stories could have played out. I don't see much if any evidence favoring historicity. i do see a slight tick towards mythicism. Plato, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Augustus all have ample reason to think they really lived. That is not the case for Jesus.