Historical Jesus, Biblical Jesus

[mordant]

What seems to be missed in all these thousands of posts is that whatever historical Jesus actually existed wasn't one figure but several, loosely pastiched together much the same way characters in novels and movies are amalgamations of several real characters.  During that time period charlatans pretending to be gods or miracle workers must have been common; humanity was considerably more childlike in its ignorance and easily put into thrall to spectacle.  Since the earliest accounts of A Single Jesus emerge decades after he was supposedly active, that they got consolidated from accounts of several figures into a single figure seems far more probable than that after decades, an actual single figure is suddenly remembered.

The pastiche thereafter was given mythical eminence, and that myth is what's described in the KJV.

I don't have a molecule of evidence for any of that but it seems much more plausible than an actual single personality being Jesus that history just never seemed to record in a manner consonant with other notable figures reaching thousands of years into prior antiquity.

The composite character idea is not without merit but I tend to think it is a complete fabrication, possibly with some acts of or events in the lives of some real people borrowed and feathered in, or possibly not. Completely forged gospels, epistles, "acts of x" and apocalypses were plentiful in that era and the following centuries. Even some of the books of the canonical NT are forged; we just don't use that word, we nice it up with "pseudepigrapha". Several works attributed to Paul have been well demonstrated not to be written by Paul, for example. Regarding a popular tome in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, the Acts of Thecla, we know it was forged because we have a record of where the author was brought before a church tribunal and convicted of same, and admitted to it in open court. Even after this became known, the book continued to be stubbornly popular with Christians, to the point that it became annoying to the Catholics because the veneration of Thecla (a female) rivaled the veneration of Mary.

More of these books have been lost (or burned) than we currently possess, and there are still plenty of them.

Given all these fanciful accounts in wide circulation, there's no real reason to assume that Bible Jesus didn't also evolve a great deal. There's agreement among scholars that the canonical gospels are based on "sayings of Jesus" types of source materials common in the day, now lost to us, and who is to say what the provenance of those are. You can see Jesus and the dogma around him evolving even from the earlier to later canonical Gospels. You can see the account of Jesus' trial evolving in those same documents as the blame gradually shifts from Rome to the Sanhedrin.

Whether Jesus was completely or partly made up from one or more template persons, or just embellished from the life of a single individual, Bible Jesus and Historical Jesus have little in common -- this much we know for sure.