Before I begin, let me state that I'm an atheist. If it were proven that Jesus didn't exist, it would have little impact on my life, and I have no need to defend the Gospels or anything.
Probably the most important resource for the nonexistence of Jesus Christ of the New Testament is found in the unadulterated writings of Josephus Flavianum, General of the army defending Jerusalem against the Romans in the seige of CE 70. He wrote both a History of the Jews and Jewish Wars. In the first, there are over 20 Jesus' mentioned, none of which bear any resemblence to the fictional Jesus. The closest example actually was tortured by Pontius Pilate and discussed in detail by Josephus. He's just a kook running around Jerusalem crying "Woe is Israel", and Pilate lets him go. He is killed by a boulder launched by a Roman Seige engine.
While it's fine that you don't believe the Testimonium Flavianum to be authentic, you really need to address it if you're going to talk about Josephus and Jesus. For those who don't know about it, it's a brief paragraph found in Antiquities that discusses Jesus, but talks about him in some odd ways that sound rather Christian. My understanding is that most scholars think that it's just an altered passage, not an entirely inserted one. You need to present some sort of argument for complete insertion if you really want to argue that Josephus did not mention Jesus.
In addition, you still need to deal with the other passage in Antiquities that references "James, the brother of Jesus, called Christ." That's pretty much universally considered authentic, and it's referenced pretty early elsewhere. Again, you're going to need a pretty good argument for this being an insertion before you can state that Josephus never, ever mentioned Jesus.
And even if you were correct that it were certain that Josephus never mentioned Jesus of Nazareth at all, so what? Jesus was probably another run of the mill apocalyptic preacher/faith healer, but with a rather populist message. If he really didn't do any miracles, then why expect much of a mention? Did Josephus routinely go on about every minor so called prophet around? You might be able to argue that the lack of mention of widespread miracles, like the unnatural darkness upon Jesus' death, is a good sign that they didn't happen, but it's rather hard to argue that the lack of mention by someone who wasn't necessarily interested in what Jesus was doing is particularly damning.
The first positive evidence that Christianity exists is found in the exchange between Pliny the Younger, prefect during the reign of the Emperor Trajan, 112 CE.
This is well after the accepted dating of most of the New Testament, so this is almost certainly false.
There is no earthly Jesus in this new secret religion.
And your evidence for this is...
Seriously, the NT documents all predate this letter, and they point towards belief in an Earthly Jesus. Heck, we know that Tacitus used Pliny the Younger as a source elsewhere (for the Vesuvius eruption, which Pliny had witnessed), so it's quite possible that he used Pliny for information on Christians, and since Tacitus mentions that "Christus" was crucified under Pontius Pilate, this indicates that the Christians of Pliny's day did believe in a physical Jesus. Even if Tacitus didn't get that information from Pliny, he didn't write that long after that letter, so it's probably still the case that those Christians believed in a physical Jesus.
But it is spreading like wildfire, and taking people and money away from the establishment religions. Pliny says it is a huge problem, but by persecuting them he temporarily checks the spread.
Money wasn't really the issue. The problems came from meeting in secret and not worshiping the state gods. Pliny was worried that this could be the basis for an insurrectionist group at some point. Keep in mind that this sort of thing was considered such an issue that Pliny was denied permission to start a fire department where he governed for fears of how powerful such an organization could get. It seems the only reason that Trajan is allowing it to exist is because having people persecuted for anonymous accusations is worse for the area.
The letters of Paul came first, forged in Marcionite circles. By around 130 CE it looks like the gospel of Mark is put together, which is taken completely from the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), mainly Isaiah.
This is far later dating than I've ever heard from anyone. Please present your evidence for everything you claimed in these sentences.
When Christianity is first introduced as having a real person in its history (the epistles forged by Marcion have a celestial, not earthly christ),
Again, present evidence that these epistles were from Marcion and didn't refer to an earthly Christ.
it has to explain why nobody has ever heard of this superstar Jesus before. It's because despite cheating death, the women are too afraid to tell anyone. So the Gospel of Mark arises out of the mist to tell this story, with nobody even willing to take credit for the writing of it at the time.
Or it was simply to hide the fact that the resurrection story was new, even if Jesus was real. Or perhaps it had a literary purpose.
There is no chain of anyone who met any earthly Jesus. The alleged apostle Paul is emphatic he had a vision on the way to Damascus, not that he met Jesus in person.
We have James' letters as well as Paul describing meeting James and the apostles. We have claims from early church fathers that they were only a couple layers removed from the sources. You need to deal with these things rather than just state that no chain exists.
The proto-catholics in Rome are the ones who started the legend of the immediate disciples, and most importantly Peter so that they could claim title to the religious throne: the Papacy.
But since those disciples are in Paul's letters, the Gospels, and Acts, they can't have come from Rome if Marcion was involved in their composition. Or are you claiming that Marcion started the Roman church?
The crazy diversity of early Christianity was suppressed for over a thousand years, beginning most importantly with the Emperor Constantine who declared Christianity the official Roman religion. Their first great council was at Nicea in 325, and by the end of that century they had completed several others that resulted in the official canon.
The councils were not about cannon at all. The books that are now part of the NT were already generall the most popular books and widely accepted books. The council of Nicaea was about affirming what was already widely believed as well as some rather specific matters that don't really concern this discussion, not about creating a religion from scratch or anything. You'll notice that only a tiny handful didn't agree with its results.
The Marcionites could not be defeated so they were co-opted with the inclusion of doctored letters of the alleged Paul and other forgeries in that name.
What? The letters of Paul were considered extremely important as early as the second century, and they were quite popular. Please actually research things before you make bizarre claims like this.
So the Marcionites are represented by the Pauline letters and the Proto Catholics are pushing the gospels. They are merged through the forgery of the book of Acts, which has Paul supposedly meeting the Jerusalem disciples.
And your evidence for this is...
There was no martyred peter or paul, and for that matter there was no Jesus Christ either.
Why do you say this? You've presented a much more bizarre, convoluted story than simply acceptence that both of these guys existed. Paul is particularly strange, since there's nothing inherently supernatural or strange about the guy aside from claims of a vision of some sort. Why do you think it's more likely that he was entirely made up?
What started Christianity can be found in the very first mention of it in the historical record: the Pliny/Trajan exchange.
But there's barely any discussion of what they believed there. How can you use that to determine what they believed?
They said **** the church. **** having to buy sacrificial animals for the authorities. We are going to eat together in our own homes and give nothing to anyone but ourselves. They pledged not to lie or steal or bear false witness too, but the main thing was keeping the fruits of their own labor instead of giving it to the rich and powerful in the name of God. That is why Christianity could not be stopped in the early going.
What? Do you actually know anything about either the early church or religion in the Roman empire? The persecutions were never about money.
So what the Roman state authority did was co-opt it instead of trying to suppress it. They made it a state monopoly religion and used it to control the people. That is meant in the most literal sense because every single person had to register in a Church Parish, and the religion became the law.
It's far more complicated than that, with various levels of toleration and persecution before Theodosius made Christianity mandatory. Heck, you even had Julian the Apostate in the middle of the fourth century trying to bring paganism to the forefront again, banning Christians from teaching.
To be brutally honest, it doesn't look like you've actually researched these issues at all. You've made some very bizarre claims and presented absolutely no evidence for them whatsoever. And you completely avoided the issue of why this particular Jesus story would be made up in the first place. Jesus obviously didn't fulfill what was believed to be messianic prophesy, with the Gospel authors rather awkwardly trying to fit him in arbitrary OT verse, claiming that those were the actual prophesy. Why do that rather than make up someone who fulfilled the prophesies better? And then the whose clearly false contradictory stories about Jesus being born in Bethlehem, yet being called a Nazorean. Why not just have him be "Jesus of Bethlehem" and not bother with that nonsense if you're just making it up? And then there's the crucifixion, which we can confirm was considered embarrassing in the early days of Christianity (Municius Felix specifically brings it up as a criticism in his Octavius, and he answers rather awkwardly by avoiding talking about the crucifixion as much as possible). Why make up something that's considered so degrading if you're making up a religion from scratch? Basically, most of these points make plenty of sense if Jesus was a real guy from Nazareth who got killed, but whose followers still claimed that he was the messiah, but it doesn't make much sense to make up from scratch. If you want to show that Jesus never existed, you're going to have to come up with a plausible reason why this story would have come about despite these odd issues, and you have not done this.
