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Notes -
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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