I wonder if people will ever accept the obvious, which is that there was no actual human being called Jesus at the root of Christianity.

The earliest extant Christian documents are the letters and epistles. Save for three passages, two of which are likely later interpolations and one which is likely describing a mythical scene, none of the letters and epistles make reference to Jesus Christ as a person who had lived on Earth in the recent past. Instead they speak of Jesus as a divine being revealed through scripture and inspiration, who carried out his saving activities in the spiritual realm…similar to other savior gods of the age.

Only in Acts, a fictional origin story for Christianity, do we find people speaking of the beginnings of the faith the way you would expect them to—tracing the movement back to Jesus’ ministry, crucifixion, and alleged resurrection. But Acts was written long after the letters and epistles, and after the Gospels…which also came after the letters and epistles…had been circulating for some time. Acts was written primarily for political reasons…to give apostolic authority to the Roman church.

As for the Gospels themselves, scholarship has pretty conclusively determined that “Mark” was written first and the other authors copied from him. Even John is heavily dependent on Mark. In other words…had there been no Mark…there might well have never have been any Gospels. This is a very odd state of affairs. If Christianity had started with actual person about whom memories, stories and anecdotes were passed along by word of mouth, why would we not have truly independent accounts of his life? Mark, Matthew, Luke, and especially John all have different “takes” on Jesus…even though they copy large swaths of Mark and borrow heavily from his narrative structure, Matthew, Luke and, again, especially John have no qualms about changing or reordering Mark’s account as they see fit. Why did they not simply all write their own accounts, entirely in their own words, based on the stories and traditions about Jesus that were circulating within their own faith communities, the better to get their own individual perspectives on Jesus across?

Think of it this way…there have been many books written about Abraham Lincoln. The authors have undoubtedly consulted many of the same reference works, and they all include many of the same events in their books, but some include events that others leave out, some place more emphasis on certain events than others, etc. But what they do not do is go back to the first book written about Lincoln and copy huge chunks of it. Obviously there was much less concern about plagiarism in the ancient world, BUT…had Jesus existed in the very recent past, had his story spread far and wide among Jews and Gentiles alike as the legendary account of the origin and spread of Christianity states, then the Gospel writers would not have lacked for sources from which to construct their own accounts. They would not have relied so heavily on a single source, Mark.

Some claim that Occam’s Razor decrees that the “simplest” explanation is that there was an actual human figure at the root of Christianity. But, in fact, the evidence we have better fits an explanation that excludes such a figure. Paul and the other epistle writers know nothing about him. They tell us in no uncertain terms who the object of their faith is—again, an entirely spiritual figure revealed through scripture and inspired visions