Irrelevant. "Which myth" is still included in one of the two basic options.
No you have a third option where you have a barely remembered flesh and blood Jesus but his past is made up to fit with Paul's vision.
In the
What counts as a historical Jesus? thread, I talked about how you could have a Jesus who was born c 12 BCE in the small town of Cana, who preached a few words of wisdom to small crowds of no more than 10 people at a time, and died due to being run over by a chariot at the age of 50 but it would still make the Gospel Jesus
mythical and nonhistorical because this historical Jesus did not teach as reported in the Gospels nor was put to death in the circumstances there recorded.
In this thread I postulated a man going for the 1st century version of suicide by cop by running into the Temple and trashing the place while yelling 'I am Jesus King of the Jews' before being run through with a sword by a guard. Again not historical as that Jesus did not teach as reported in the Gospels, nor was put to death in the circumstances there recorded, and certainly didn't found Christianity.
As I said before the 'let's minimize Jesus to the point all the problems of no one noticing him goes away' idea creates the situation of Jesus
effectively not existing. It reminds me of a joke I heard a long time ago:
Believer: I found Jesus
Skeptic: I didn't know he was lost.
Believer: He must be as there are all these quests to find him.
Skeptic: ...
In some respects the historical Jesus quest has gotten to the level of Robin Hood and King Arthur where people are finding the historical people that were the "basis" for the stories as much as 200 years away from the traditional period of the stories. It get tot he point that one get the impression of less a look for a historical core and more a desperate desire to find someone
anyone who reasonably fits whatever criteria the researcher is looking for.
In the case of Robin Hood and King Arthur there may have been no core but various people woven into a core composite character who while based on various actual people in fact never really existed. The same my be true of the Gospel Jesus.
One of the strange parts of the whole Jesus story is the first recorded attempt at creating a Christian Bible used Luke which the editor (Marcion) believed had actually been written by Paul and started at our Luke 3:1.
But if one sits down and thinks about what Marcion is actually saying you quickly realize he is implying that Luke's story is
also a vision Paul had. Add in the Lucan priority school of thought which has
Luke not Mark as the first Gospel and things quickly go south real fast.
) is that Paul met "James, the Lord's brother" (Galatians 1:19) and per John Frum picking up a man who only has sisters as a brother in about 17 years after some native uses the name that is totally useless as proof that the Jesus Paul wrote of actually existed out of Paul's mind.
The four canonal Gospels babble nonhistorical nonsense when they give us anything we can actually check against known history such as the Sanhedrin trial, the capture of Jesus, Pontius Pilate's behavior regarding the trial and Jewish mob, the way the crucified body of Jesus was handled, and the reactions of the Romans to a man who supposedly "died" after only a few hours (when it took days to die) and reports of him being seen afterword.
The Gospels come off less then actual history an more the early 2nd century equivalent of a Penny Dreedful-Dime Novel.
Here is something from Philo, now tell me it doesn't feel familiar:
"...setting him up there on high that he might be seen by everybody, flattened out a leaf of papyrus and put it on his head instead of a diadem, and clothed the rest of his body with a common door mat instead of a cloak, and instead of a sceptre they put in his hand a small stick of the native papyrus which they found lying by the wayside and gave to him ; and when, like actors in theatrical spectacles, he had received all the insignia of royal authority, and had been dressed and adorned like a king, the young men bearing sticks on their shoulders stood on each side of him instead of spear-bearers, in imitation of the body-guards of the king, and then others came up, some as if to salute him, and others making as though they wished to plead their causes before him, and others pretending to wish to consult with him about the affairs of the state.
Then from the multitude of those who were standing around there arose a wonderful shout of men calling out Maris ; and this is the name by which it is said that they call the kings among the Syrians ; for they knew that Agrippa was by birth a Syrian, and also that he was possessed of a great district of Syria of which he was the sovereign." (a comment a little later gives us a date range of 32-38 CE for this incident)
Moreover in The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology Joseph Campbell stated "(i)t is clear that, whether accurate or not as to biographical detail, the moving legend of the Crucified and Risen Christ was fit to bring a new warmth, immediacy, and humanity, to the old motifs of the beloved Tammuz, Adonis, and Osiris cycles." ie the myth came first even if Jesus was found to be a flesh and blood person!
I tend to agree with Remsburg that there feels just enough to say that there likely was a human being named Jesus but also the Gospels tell us nothing about that man; nothing about what he preached, nothing about anything he did, or even how he died.
