I've been questioning this for quite some time. It all started when I had read that Jesus traces his lineage to king David not through his mother Mary, but through Joseph. But Joseph did not father Jesus.
I've also recently read an interesting article
HERE which seems to prove that king David and king Solomon were never real people and that the temple of king Solomon was mythical. The article goes into a lot of detail about Jehovah's origins, how Mount Zion isn't real and was a mystical mountain in the north pole. How Jews stole bits and pieces of other people's religious ideas to create Judaism. The article gives the etymological history of the word Zion, the name Yahwey, and even where the idea and concept of Satan came from. Are the things in that article true?
I don't know what to think or believe anymore. I'm wondering if the Cathars were right? They believed that the flesh was corrupt and that Jesus, being holy, was never a physical person, but a spiritual concept.
How can we prove to ourselves that Jesus was a historical person, of divine origin?
People who begin to think that Jesus didn’t literally exist should go into an exercise where they try to argue it in reverse, completely assume that it is 100% fact that he was not real, then go into historical Jesus studies and see how many brick walls you run into that begin to not make any sense. In geometry this would be similar to what’s called proof by contradiction, arguing to an absurdity. You will discover for yourself that it takes much more glue to hold the historical picture together that Jesus didn’t exist than that he did exist.
First of all, lumping in historical Jesus studies with how many concepts from the Old Testament were symbolic, or how many concepts were shared between cultures, is only going to confuse you. That’s a a topic by itself. The different cultures DID reference identical symbolisms quite often on purpose because it was a form of argumentation between them, they were trying to correct each other in a way. The Israelite prophets were constantly trying to pull the people away from false idols, and in doing so it was common practice to draw analogies between common symbolisms, places, etc.
As far as reaching proof by contradiction for a real historical Jesus by assuming his non-existence, you can just jump in anywhere and run wild! You immediately run into the dilemma of what to do with all of the other 1st century Jews who claimed to be the Messiah and then got themselves killed because of it. It’s going to immediately look historically odd to simply scrap all such references, to conclude that all messianic movements and messianic leaders were simply made up! So either messianic movements that protested the rule of Rome were all made up, OR, were some of them real figures, yet only some of them were made up? What do you do with different categories of messianic movements, for instance did the Zealot movements really exist, yet the peaceful ones were false? A big problem that I have to the Jesus never existed argument is always to wonder why they decide to just lift Jesus out of the messianic movement era and ONLY delete him from the picture, but nobody else?
All textual references to the Roman crucifixion of Jesus must be completely suspect if you are to assume that Jesus was made up! So let’s just throw all of that out now! Why is there a Roman correspondence discussing what to do with James the brother of Jesus if Jesus isn’t real? Why are there a ton of arguments going back & forth between first generation Christians and non-converted orthodox Jews about how Jesus was a phony, yet nothing by way of an argument for the position that he didn’t exist instead? That argument certainly would be the easiest one to go with since it’s actually true that he didn’t exist (remember that we’re arguing in reverse, we’re assuming Jesus never existed). Why did the Gnostics argue that Jesus was 100% divine but not human, instead of arguing that he didn’t exist in the physical realm but was only a spirit? Why do Jews from day one argue with Christians that Jesus did not fulfill the Messianic prophecies instead of argue that he didn’t exist? Why waste your time with all those arguments, It’s pretty obvious that if someone didn’t exist they didn’t fulfill prophecies either!
You need to think harder about the weight of Jewish objections to Jesus, their disdain for him, and then consider how much sense it would make that early Jews never even made a single argument that he didn’t actually exist. If there ARE early Jewish arguments against Christians, and none of them involve Jesus’ non-existence, then this is not an argument from silence. Why do Muslims argue that he didn’t die on the cross, instead of argue that he didn’t exist? Why do Muslims consider Jesus to just be another one of the prophets? Why are there no counter arguments going on for Paul’s early letters in the form of “What are you talking about, who on Earth was Jesus of Nazareth?” Why is there this heated tomb/empty tomb argument going on? What tomb?
Why in Acts, after the made up crucifixion of a made up man, do you immediately start running into conflicts about what Jesus meant by this or by that? That one is extremely strange! So there is this made up messianic movement, by this made up Jesus, and he has a made up crucifixion date, AND THEN after the made up crucifixion date the followers literally start acting confused in regards to who Jesus would have sided with in this or that disagreement! Yet before his made up crucifixion date this made up man called Jesus settled all of the disputes with clarity. Peter & Paul parted ways over such disputes, because their made up leader who used to have all of the answers is now passed his made up crucifixion date, so now he can no longer settle disputes. Do you see how the story of a made up Jesus starts to become much harder to hold together than if Jesus was real?
How about how the earliest Christians struggled with what’s often referred to as the difficult sayings of Jesus? Such as Jesus saying “My God My God why have you forsaken me” or “The Father is greater than I.” If Jesus is just an invention, why on Earth would you invent him saying things that caused uncomfortable confusion between Christians right from the first generation? If Jesus was just made up it definitely would have made a lot more sense to pencil in a few Jesus quotes here & there that would have settled many of these very early disputes that have been going on for 2000 years.