Yes, the founder has necessarily to be a real person. But not the one from which the tales are made. For example, all greek mysteries purported to come from a real teacher, but in most cases these were gods, i.e., not real people.
There is really no evidence of a christian sect forming in Jerusalem at the time of the supposed death of Jesus. Christianity appeared for all purposes in the Greek Asian Minor, pushed by someone who called himself Paul, and all the writings we have are from Greek-speaking composers. The idea that Christianity goes back to a Jesus and his followers in Judea seems to be a romantic idea used by the real founders of the movement to make it older than it really was.
None of the ancient Greek mystery religions claimed a recent human founder as their central figure. Their central figures were almost all deities, not humans; even when they occasionally centred on a human, it was a hero who lived in the distant uncertain past, not someone who lived at a defined recent historical moment. By contrast, the four canonical Gospels all agree that Jesus was executed while Pontius Pilate was governor of Judaea (between 26/27 and 36/37 CE), and it seems likely those Gospels were composed within a century of that date.
> There is really no evidence of a christian sect forming in Jerusalem at the time of the supposed death of Jesus.
The New Testament is evidence. To be clear, a historical text claiming X is evidence for X. Now, we can argue about how whether it is strong evidence or weak evidence, but either way it is still evidence. And of course, accepting the text as evidence, doesn't mean we have to accept all of its claims as equal in evidential weight, especially those of a miraculous or supernatural nature. If a text makes a mixture of claims, some historically plausible, and others which are (from a purely secular perspective) extraordinarily improbable, it is reasonable to judge its evidential strength as being much higher with respect to the former claims than with respect to the later.
> Christianity appeared for all purposes in the Greek Asian Minor, pushed by someone who called himself Paul, and all the writings we have are from Greek-speaking composers.
The vast majority of scholars accept Galatians as an authentic work of Paul. In Galatians 1-2, he claims the "Jesus Christ" movement which he propagates pre-existed his conversion to it, and he reports visiting its leadership in Jerusalem. So this is evidence that a "Jesus Christ" movement existed in Jerusalem prior to Paul's conversion to it.
> The idea that Christianity goes back to a Jesus and his followers in Judea seems to be a romantic idea used by the real founders of the movement to make it older than it really was.
In order for that to be true, either (1) Galatians is not an authentic letter of Paul, (2) Galatians has been tampered with to insert material claiming Paul visited the pre-existing proto-Christian community at Jerusalem, (3) Paul was lying. While none of that is impossible, it seems less likely than that Paul really did join a pre-existing religious sect headquartered in Jerusalem. In particular, while I'm no expert at biblical Greek, scholars argue that there is no textual evidence in support of (1) or (2).
Saying that Pauline Christianity had its origins in a pre-existing proto-Christian sect headquartered in Jerusalem, is not denying that Paul took it in some innovative theological directions, such that it ended up with significant differences from that starting point. One obvious difference–apparent from Paul's own writings–is a much greater distance from Judaism, moving beyond being a sect of Judaism and towards becoming an entirely distinct religion.
Gospels are not historical texts. They are religious literature. They present zero evidence of the facts they narrate.
Religious literature is a form of historical evidence. The LDS scriptures (Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price) is historical evidence for the thinking of Joseph Smith and the early Mormons. The Quran and Hadith are historical evidence for early Islam and the life of Muhammad. The Scientology scriptures are historical evidence for L. Ron Hubbard. And, in the exact same way, Christian religious literature is historical evidence for the history of Christianity. Accepting all of this as historical evidence, doesn't mean we have to uncritically accept all of their claims – we can compare them to other sources (when they exist, they don't always do); we can judge the inherent plausibility of each claim, and justifiably be open to accepting the more historically probable claims of these texts while rejecting the miraculous elements of them. Of course, if one has a faith commitment to one of these religions, that might predispose one to accept rather than reject some of those miraculous claims, but then one isn't playing the language-game (Sprachspiel) of "secular history of religions" any more, one is playing a different language-game instead.
But the reality is, most Christians never cared much about this problem. Exactly which miracles Jesus of Nazareth did or didn't do, and exactly which order he did them in, was never seen as particularly important by most Christians. Sure, there have always been some who have wanted to "smooth things over" by constructing Gospel harmonies (most famously Tatian's Diatessaron), but it has always been a minority concern. Ultimately, in Christianity, there is only one miracle which really counts (the Resurrection), with the virgin birth following close behind–the rest pale in significance. And, it is worth noting, that the numerous factional disputes which consumed early Christianity ("heresies"), almost none of them were concerned with questions of which miracles happened or which order they happened in, most of them were about more abstract theological questions, or else more practical matters (e.g. can sinful clergy perform valid sacraments, which was the central dispute motivating Donatism and Novatianism.)
I think you really touched on it here.
Jesus was born. He is man and God.
Jesus was crucified.
Jesus was resurrected.
Jesus ascended into heaven.
Those miracles/events are the core events that are necessary.
I feel like you are simultaneously violating the scientific perspective (where a small numbers of impossibilities is just as bad as a large number although it feels more plausible - fake psychics exploit this discrepancy by only moving light objects short distances as if that was any easier) and the religious one (where you're making the accusation that all of the early church fathers were pathological liars, and that Jesus was at best misinformed when he referred to bronze age myths in his sermons) in an attempt to sit on the fence and appease the mental habits taught by two deeply conflicting cultures.
There is even a bible verse about this: "So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth." (Revelation 3:16)
> How can you say that the authors of the bible made up 99 miracles but were honest about a few of them?
Personally, I doubt the Gospel authors consciously invented stories intending to deceive people. I suspect a lot of what happened, is people constructed tales which were meant as metaphors rather than literally true, but at some point in the retelling their metaphorical nature was forgotten. In other cases, such as healings – people actually did have the subjective experience of being miraculously healed, whatever objectively may have been going on – something which still happens today, whether at Lourdes or at Pentecostal churches. Similarly, many cases of demonic possession were likely culture-bound syndromes, and exorcists actually can heal culture-bound syndromes. Even someone with a mental illness which is less culture-bound in nature, convince them a miracle worker has cured them, and they may actually experience a respite in symptoms, even if sometimes only a temporary one. Added to that, stories about healings and exorcisms tend to grow in the retelling, so elements of the stories which seem medically impossible may be later embellishments, and the core may involve a medically plausible story of a faith healer who uses the placebo effect, the psychosomatic nature of some illnesses, the ability of mental state to influence the odds and rate of recovery from actual physical illness or injury, the actual non-zero efficacy of faith healing in treating mental illness in populations predisposed to believe in its effectiveness, etc, etc.
Please don't (mis)quote the Bible at me if you don't take it seriously. This isn't what this verse means and is a distraction.
>How can you say that the authors of the bible made up 99 miracles but were honest about a few of them?
My comment was directed to a fellow Christian and lacked a lot of context important for non believers. Let me try and unpack my original intent.
There are a LOT of facts and pseudofacts in the Bible. There are a LOT (like a lot) of distractions in the discussions of Christianity. There is a small number of relevant and key facts that are critical to agree on. If these facts are wrong - nothing else matters. If we disagree on these facts - nothing else matters. These facts are commonly summarized as "The Gospel". Here they are:
God created everything
God created you and me to be in a perfect relationship with Him
We sinned and are separated from this perfect relationship
There is no way we can earn our way back to this perfect relationship
Jesus, who is God, came to earth. He lived a perfect life. He died the death that I deserve.
He was resurrected
He ascended to heaven
If I accept His death in place of mine, I can live forever in a perfect relationship with the God of the Universe
------
That is it. Here are some things that don't matter: How many fish Jesus used to feed people. Are Angels real. What on earth was happening in Genesis ch 6 (Christians, you know what I'm talking about). Was David king.
These questions might be nice to talk about amd agree on - BUT - and this is important - if we can't agree on the Gospel then nothing else matters. Nothing. So let's not get distracted with "do all 4 gospels agree on the order of the miracles". Let's stay focused on things that point to the gospel. Did Jesus die? Was he resurrected? Did he ascend into heaven?
Because if we can agree on these questions (and the others in the gospel), then and only then can we talk about "Did Jesus walk on water" or "is homosexuality wrong". But if Jesus didn't come back to life, then I am truely screwed and nothing else matters. (and, yes, there is a bible verse for that, but I'm not going to waste my time looking it up)
Catholicism takes this idea of "core"-versus-"non-core", and elaborates it into a whole "hierarchy of truths" (also called "theological notes"), with numerous defined levels. Orthodoxy and Protestantism have never accepted the details of that picture, but most Orthodox and Protestants would probably agree that it is more than a simple binary, it is more of a spectrum, even if they think Catholic theology went overboard in trying to break down that spectrum into precisely defined levels. (And some contemporary Catholic theologians agree with the criticism that Catholic theology did historically go overboard with this.) Viewed in that light, it can be defended that while both the Resurrection and the Virgin Birth belong to the core, the former is "even more core" than the later; there may be a small number of other individual miracles (such as the Transfiguration) which may be somewhat core as well, although clearly "less core" than either the Resurrection or the Virgin Birth are. But, one doesn't need to be a Christian at all to understand all this – one can understand the details of the history of how Christians have understood their own doctrines and dogmas, whether or not one personally believes in any of them.
> If I accept His death in place of mine
This sounds to me like an expression of penal substitutionary atonement (PSA). While many Protestants (especially conservative evangelical ones) tend to believe that PSA is core to the Gospel, other Christians disagree. The intellectual history of PSA can be traced through Anselm of Canterbury in mediaeval England, who in turn influenced Catholic scholastic theology (especially Thomas Aquinas) and then Protestant Reformers such as Luther and Calvin (who despite openly rejecting much of mediaeval Catholic theology, sometimes retained more of it than they consciously realised.) The whole satisfaction/substitutionary approach to atonement is rather Latin/Western (Roman Catholic and Protestant), while Eastern Christian traditions (Eastern Orthodoxy, Eastern Catholicism, Oriental Orthodoxy, Church of the East) put more emphasis on alternatives such as ransom theory and recapitulation theory. While one could interpret your statement in terms of ransom or recapitulation theory, I doubt such an interpretation would be true to what you actually meant by it.
If someone tells you a story with several elements in it, one that is important but you can't verify, and the others which are trivial but you know to be lies, what would you say about the one important claim they're making? I don't see how someone can (for example) say that angels or miracles are supposed to be metaphorical without calling in to question whether the birth of Christ was metaphorical.
I doubt the Gospels contain "lies". Even if it is true that many of the events in them never happened as described, I doubt they are deliberate falsehoods – which is what "lies" are. I think it is far more likely that its authors genuinely believed they were writing the truth, even if it turns out they sometimes weren't. I think most religious scriptures (whatever the religion) are the product of genuine (even if mistaken) belief rather than blatant charlatanism. Stories can evolve through retelling (especially in oral-centric cultures), such that a small kernel of truth becomes surrounded by elaborate fictions, without anybody ever consciously engaging in lying or deception.
Furthermore, a Christian who believes in the "core miracles", but doesn't extend their belief to the "non-core", is unlikely to agree that they "know" that these non-core miracles are false. They are more likely to say that, they have a faith conviction in the truth of the core, but are agnostic ("I don't know") with respect to how much truth is contained in the non-core. I'd be surprised if there was anyone who was positive about the truth of the core, and just as positive about the falsehood of the non-core.
It was the success of Paul's version of Christianity that made everyone follow his "revealed Jesus" point of view, which later was embellished in the "gospel of Mark" as a person living in Israel, and reedited several times by different anonymous writers.
I think you are interpreting Paul's words here in an overly literalistic fashion. He isn't claiming that people preaching "another Christ" are preaching a different historical figure as their saviour – as in "my Christ is Jesus of Nazareth, your Christ is Menachem of Jericho". Rather, he is claiming their theology or morals are so wrong that the "Christ" they preach is no longer the "real one" even if it still claims the same historical figure as its foundation.
Today, you can walk into a fundamentalist Protestant church, and hear a preacher complaining that Catholics follow "another Christ and another Gospel". The preacher isn't claiming Catholicism is based on a different historical figure; rather, he is claiming that their theology and morals are so radically wrong it might as well be. You don't have to have any sympathy at all for the preacher's views, to understand that Paul was making the same kind of claim, just in a very different time and place, and against rather different targets.
> It was the success of Paul's version of Christianity that made everyone follow his "revealed Jesus" point of view, which later was embellished in the "gospel of Mark" as a person living in Israel,
That's a hypothesis. How strong is the evidence for that hypothesis? Most scholars think it is quite weak – even among non-Christian scholars (such as atheists and Jews) who don't have any theological motivation for rejecting it. The alternative hypothesis–that Paul joined a pre-existing Jewish sect based in Jerusalem, centred on the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth, but transformed it into a rather different religion by refocusing it away from Jews and towards recruiting Gentiles–is considered the more probable one by mainstream scholarship.
Furthermore, if we look at the more specific information we have, we find information which arguably increases that probability even further. Suppose, hypothetically, that the early Christian sources had disagreed about which century Jesus had lived in-that fact surely would have increased the odds that Jesus was mythical. But, conversely, the fact that all known early Christian sources which explicitly date his life, do so to the same period, give or take a few years at most, has to increase the odds that Jesus was historical. Conversely, Buddhist sources disagree (by decades, even centuries in some cases) about when Siddharta Gautama lived, which implies his odds of being mythical are greater than those of Jesus of Nazareth.
There is nothing religious about these arguments - they are simply treating Christianity as one religion among many, trying to devise general criteria - applicable to any religion - to determine whether a religious founder is likely historical or mythical, and then applying those criteria to Christianity