Leaderboard

If you are asking this question in earnest, you might want to consider exploring the works of Joseph Campbell.... The Power of Myth/The Hero's Journey/ etc. etc. etc. The Hero With A Thousand Faces

It's an argument against the historicity of the resurrection. Anyone who suggests it actually happened in history is interested in the evidence for it. For the birth of Christianity, all that is required is that people believed it. That is not in dispute.

I think I need to be clear here. Whatever is behind religion was most certainly created by man. Whether you can boil it down to a single person is debatable, and you almost certainly cannot identify that person. But it was certainly people who came up with the gods. I've often said that if people did not come up with gods, then the same gods, actually existing, would have had the power to make themselves known to multiple groups of people. Europeans would have landed in the New World and told the natives here about Jesus, and the natives would have said, Jesus? We know him. Son of God, raised by a carpenter. We know all about Jesus. Crucified, right? Yeah. You mean you've been to Israel? WOW! What's that like? No two independent societies have ever concocted the same God with the same name and the same set of rules and worship requirements/preferences. But archetypes? Archetypes are elements that good stories have in common. People don't "come up with them in the explicit sense. They come up with stories.

Might even win a prize

No one is suggesting there were no believers in the first century. I would even go so far as to concede these two people existed, although there is no extra-biblical reason to make that assumption. So what? Paul talked them into Christianity. What does that prove? L Ron Hubbard talked oodles of people into Scientology. Why did they believe? because Scientology is true? Or because they were gullible as f? The existence of believers does not establish the authenticity of what they believed. If it did, literally all religions would be true!

There's profit and then there's profit (prophet?). I recently viewed a documentary about the global economy. One point in it is that some people make a living by doing or making something that adds value (to the economy) and others do so just by shifting existing value from one place or person to another. If VeePee created something that some people found value in (e.g. PFLAP) then the splinters are just shifting it around.