OK, nevermind for a moment the misuse of the word "foundational" for religions/pantheons that don't contain any characters that are really the "foundation" of it all, and focusing instead on just the thing about gods being made up...
What's the evidence that, for example, belief in Zeus originated one day long ago with somebody suddenly just making up Zeus, in a culture where there had never before been any stories mentioning a "Zeus" character, and then a bunch of people who'd never heard of Zeus before suddenly believed that person's brand-new Zeus claims anyway?
I have explained to you before (just a couple of pages back), that it does not have to be
"belief in Zeus originated one day long ago with somebody suddenly just making up Zeus". When you make statements like that it sounds just like the religious creationists who cannot understand the huge tracts of time and the very slow changes that cause evolution and where they hence deny human evolution by saying "so one day a monkey just gave birth to a human??" ...
... you are doing the same thing, talking as if the only option for a mythical Jesus would be for one individual to completely invent the entire idea of a Christ-Jesus at one specific moment on one particular day. But that is not what anyone sensible is suggesting …
… by the time that the Jesus stories were being preached, Jews in that region, and indeed people everywhere, had already believed in all manner of supernatural miracle-working gods for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years. The stories and beliefs of what those gods, angels, demons, devils etc. could do had evolved and multiplied over vast tracts of time.
Jews in that region of Judea had already believed OT prophets who had received the words of Yahweh with the promise of a saviour Christ since at leat 600BC if not 1000BC! And they had all sorts of beliefs about how and when that would happen. By the time of the Essen community about 200BC around Qumran and the Dead Sea (which is just 20 miles from Jerusalem) there was already a large community of highly religious Jews writing the Dead Sea Scrolls recording their belief in Yahweh's promise fulfilled by an apocalyptic preaching messiah who would be, or already had been, sent to Earth to warn the faithful to gather in readiness for God's final days of apocalypse.
As I have pointed out in the last several posts, there are obvious parallels with the religious content of the Scrolls and what Paul believed & wrote in his letters as much as 300 years later! So that was all in place, all those sort of apocalyptic Christ beliefs preached in that region long before any letters or gospels of the New Testament. The Scrolls even describe a regular ritual supper of bread and wine as symbolic recognition of the “truth” of their messiah beliefs. And there were apparently other Jewish groups preaching different variations of that sort of apocalyptic Christ on the streets of Judea by that time ie circa 250BC all the way through to about 100AD …
… so it's obvious with that background how preachers and believers in that region could easily come to accept and preach a story of Yehoshua as the prophesied apocalyptical messiah.
I'm not saying that the Dead SeaScrolls and the beliefs therein had to be the direct predecessor of the gospels and letters that formed what became called “Christianity”, but what I am saying is that unlike the gospels and letters and all the references to non-biblical writing such as Tacitus, Josephus, Justin Martyr, Philo etc., where all of those are know only from much later copies and with no original writing at all for us to examine, the Scrolls by complete contrast
are the original writing, and they do date back to hundreds of years before any of that later copyist writing, and they do set out in detail the religious beliefs of one large sect of Jews in that same specific small region, and those views are very similar to what was written centuries later by “Paul” in the letters … and you can check those earlier links to see what all the quite obvious similarities are.
