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But it’s at least the case that Jesus larped, and then the Disciples larped when writing about specific miracles.
Not necessarily.
Jesus may have been earnestly delusional. We certainly get a lot of schizophrenic self-proclaimed messiahs nowadays; why would the original article need to be anything more or less than the most successful one in history? C.S. Lewis used to say the "Jesus was insane" hypothesis could be dismissed by looking at the overall coherence and sensibleness of his teachings whenever he wasn't declaring himself the Son of Man. But that doesn't track with my, or many others' experiences talking to the mentally-will but well-educated. (See Scott's "Professor T" story for anecdata that's at least adjacent.) Grant that crazy attracts crazy, and whoever originated the more fantastical miracle stories may have likewise just been psychotic at the time, or something.
Granted, it's likely that someone deliberately made something up at some point, but even then I'm not sure I'd call it LARPing if they were attempting to perpetrate actual fraud against would-be followers. A hoax isn't the same thing as LARPing.
We also have to take into account that none of the accounts of Jesus we have are even claimed to be first-hand accounts - even granting that the person in fact existed and the general story of Jesus-the-religious-leader is broadly accurate, the Gospels are the product of several iterations of sanewashing (by followers who did not need to believe anything more outlandish than the common sense of the era) and selection (as we now know of Christian writings that were nixed such as the fanfic-tier Infancy gospels).
In my own estimation, the likelihood that a historical Jesus actually existed seems pretty low, and the apparent scientific consensus for it fake - looking at the main arguments commonly cited (..."we don't have more evidence about other historical figures considered uncontroversial"? "Some Roman guy writing centuries later recounted Jesus's execution as a fact"?), they seem to be borne of desperation to latch onto anything that will allow the consensus-supporter to dissociate themselves from cringe (internet atheists and professional skeptics?) and potential professional repercussions (would a prominent "Jesus was fictional" proponent have an easy time, e.g., socialising at relevant research conferences or asking to access the Vatican archives?).
This definitely isn't true!
Even setting aside the authenticity of the Gospels for the sake of argument, (and while I am not familiar with all of the fanfic-tier works, my understanding are that it's generally pretty easy to separate the fanfic-tier stuff from the canonical works due to anachronisms and such) Paul claims to have had a firsthand encounter with Christ and from what I understand mainstream academia typically recognizes many of the Pauline letters as authentic and very early dated.
See for example 1st Corinthians, which as I understand is generally believed to be genuine and originally written about twenty – thirty years after Christ's death, and in which Paul specifically claims to have met Christ (1 Corinthians 15:9).
This also isn't a remotely accurate description of the historical evidence at play. Here's a short list of non-Christians who wrote about pretty unambiguously about Christ within a single century of His death:
Before 200 AD Christians were a significant enough phenomenon that a Greek playwright wrote a parodic play featuring them. It's pretty clear that Christianity wasn't something that got dreamed up a few centuries after the fact – Romans and Greeks were writing letters and plays that display a clear familiarity with Christians and their doctrines well before that time, and we have some early Christian inscriptions as well that rule that out.
And of course this is all without reference to Christian primary sources, such as the Pauline letters (as I mentioned) or the Didache that are believed to be written relatively recently after Christ's death.
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I actually think the thing about the selection is overstated. Most of the "apocryphal gospels" significantly postdate the four canonical ones; the process of eliminating them wasn't much more than "go back to the earliest available sources and discount the dodgy latter-day additions", without much consideration to their contents per se. (I'll grant you that John's Apocalypse being included, out of any number of visionary Gnostic-adjacent ravings, is a bit of a fluke.)
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Eh. Whether or not Jesus did exist, I think you're vastly overestimating how much scholars care what laymen think. There are some who make bank off laymen like Ehrman but he's atypical. For most, it's just not that interesting and yields little status or new research. Richard Carrier is actually a historian and even he gets little attention, nobody cares that much what Hitchensfan2909 is doing.
Scholars didn't reason backwards from the cringe. They already believed that Jesus was a historical figure long before the internet cringe started and simply don't want to deal with it.
Professional consequences also doesn't explain it all. Yes, the scholars in religious institutions often have to swear to faith statements and can be fired if they deviate from doctrine. But these people are obvious - Mike Licona lost his job for denying the literal raising of the saints in Matthew. Like...no one is under the impression that he or anyone in his position would deny Jesus' existence.
But critical scholars in more secular spaces have said some pretty offensive and lurid things from the perspective of traditional doctrine (Dominic Crossan iirc denies Jesus was given a tomb and claims that he was tossed into a mass grave and left to scavengers like any criminal) and they get away with it all the time.
If we're going to psychoanalyze, I think you actually accurately represent the general public's intuition that skepticism of Jesus' existence is more radical than the alternative and their suspicion that people are dodging it out of deference to religion (or their underestimation of just how hostile critical scholarship can be to traditional doctrine). And I think this impression is why mythicism is so attractive to atheists despite their usual deference to expertise.
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Or you ignore the traditional narrative that the Disciples wrote the Gospels in which case you don't need a hoax, or delusion. It's just later believers believing what they're told or extrapolating from what the Hebrew Bible says the Messiah will do, an old tactic and not a sign of being insane or mendacious.
Except for the original resurrection claim of course. Strangely, the Disciples may be better candidates for delusion than Jesus. It's possible that Jesus really did think he'd bring about the end of Roman rule in some political sense with God's help like many other unfortunate Jews of the time. But at least some of the Disciples clearly believed that he was resurrected , which is noted by Paul to be very odd by the beliefs of the time, and were willing to be martyred despite having a front-row seat to the mother of all disconfirming events.
I've actually seen this used as a modern version of the Lewis argument by secular Christians who can't appeal to miracle claims: the Disciples had first-hand knowledge and were devout Jews. It's insane for them to go with the divinity of a crucified criminal. Unless...
Oh, I wasn't assuming the Gospels were the direct writings of the Disciples, but someone at some point needs to have originated the miracle claims; either they were later liars, or they were contemporary crazies.
Re: the Resurrection, I'm not convinced it was such a radical notion at the time, since the Gospels themselves allude to contemporary speculation that Jesus might have been a resurrected John the Baptist - and/or that John himself may have been a resurrected Isaiah.
And then there's the thing where Mark's account ends at the mourning-women finding his tomb empty and having a brief, ambiguous encounter with a man clad in white (who is, TMU, generally interpreted by believers as an angel, not even the actual risen Christ himself). There are many plausible non-supernatural reasons for Jesus's body to have been removed from Joseph of Arimathea's crypt a few days after he was placed there; it being found empty would have been plenty good enough to start hopeful speculation that he had returned, especially if Jesus himself had in fact alluded to a future resurrection prior to his death. From there, scattered eyewitness reports of risen-Jesus-sightings are no different from people claiming to have run into a middle-aged Elvis Presley.
Paul says the crucified Messiah is the stumbling block and folly, because that bit requires a Messiah claimant to die without fulfilling the prophecies and be raised. If you're reading from a secular POV, you have strong reason to be skeptical of Jesus' prophecies of his own death and resurrection (just as everyone is skeptical of his prophecies about Jerusalem) so you have a yet another Messiah claimant being brutally disproved by being hung on a tree and then followed and seemingly deified by Jews (while every other such movement died out)
The problem is that Paul says that Jesus directly appeared to people like Peter who, unlike the Gospel writer, we believe are probably his contemporaries.
Between that and the reference to the appearance to the 500, it seems like someone had to have had some delusional/bereavement episode that then spread.
But the Christians who make the case - e.g. Habermas - often skip the tomb since it first appears in the Gospels (I think Crossan denies Jesus got a grave at all since criminals weren't supposed to, despite the story having a plausible explanation). They focus on a few "minimal facts" which even critical scholars allegedly agree on.
With those few facts, it is weird. How weird depends on how strong you think the borders between paganism and Christianity were. But it seems like at least someone, maybe Peter, had a delusion (or lied)
Fact 6 is slightly confusing here. The apostles claimed to have seen a physical Jesus in his actual, resurrected body. Paul's vision of Jesus happened long after Ascension Day and was understood as a vision of someone was not currently living in a physical body - I don't see why it is evidence for a resurrection at all.
Habermas' criteria for his minimal facts is that "vast majority of even critical scholars must recognize the occurrence’s historical nature"
I can see how later Gospel material doesn't meet that standard while Paul's vaguer mentions of appearances right alongside his talk of persecuting the Church would. There's the naturalist assumption. And critical scholars accept at least seven undisputed Pauline epistles and no Gospel's attribution to an Apostle or follower of one has the same level of consensus AFAIK. So someone would likely have quibbled about the "apostle's claims" while Paul's own claims of a vision combined with vague claims about appearances to Peter, James and the 500...maybe not.
He's just being conservative I think.
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