The existence of the texts, like the existence of anything else, has to be explained. In the HP case an explanation is easily found, and it excludes the reality of the hero. The books are intentionally composed as fiction.
Well, first of all - whether any ancient religious text does, or does not, “need” to be explained, the fact that you would like to find out what lead people to write those texts, does not make those texts into actual evidence of the truth of whatever they say.
And in fact, in the case of the gospels and epistles, the only evidence about Jesus offered in any of those texts, is that the writers believed that such a figure had in some sense existed at an unknown earlier date.
The texts you are talking about (the biblical texts) actually contain no evidence of anyone ever knowing Jesus, and hence no actual personally confirmed evidence of Jesus at all.
What they contain is only evidence of peoples beliefs, i.e. in fact fanatical religious beliefs, about a messiah that none of them had ever known in any way at all except as a matter of their religious faith. But there is no actual evidence of Jesus in any of those gospels or letters.
They might easily have contained such evidence of a human Jesus. But in fact they do not. Instead they talk only about such things as Paul seeing visions of the dead Jesus, Paul believing he understood God’s messiah message from what had been revealed to him in the OT scriptures, about gospel writers saying that although they never knew Jesus, people had told stories of “disciples” who witnessed Jesus performing constant miracles and constantly making all sorts of wise and wonderful insightful religious statements, prophecies, and pronouncing all sorts of apocryphal tales of religious guidance to the faithful …
… those are accounts of the writers beliefs about what they had heard as earlier anonymous stories about a miraculous Jesus. But there is no actual evidence there of anyone ever claiming to have met Jesus and thus providing any first hand reliable evidence of what they actually knew of their time with Jesus. In fact, as many people have pointed out, there is a deafening silence on any such evidential details which might conceivably have qualified as actual evidence of the living human Jesus … e.g. no credible evidence of any real details of an ordinary human life, but instead what is written as the accounts of Jesus is practically all a collection of entirely theological and religious “pericopes” each of which presents various advice and guidance preached to the faithful as illustration of how they too should follow the example of the messiah in living their religious lives unto God.
But this is not evidently the case with the gospels, dejudge's forged false fiction hoax thesis aside. One possible explanation is that there really was a Jesus figure. Another possible explanation is the "pre-existing myth" hypothesis, and in these threads other proposals have been advanced. Thus the gospels are "evidence" for these explanations, including the not outrageous or impossible proposal that a Jesus really existed.
You are attempting to introduce something called “evidence of a possible explanation” (see your highlighted words). I.e., you are now talking about the bible as “evidence” not of Jesus himself, but as evidence of a “possible explanation” of something!
Well, the gospels and letters are indeed evidence of a “possible explanation of something” ... they are evidence of a possible explanation of peoples religious beliefs!
Yes, of course one possible explanation for those beliefs is that Jesus may have really existed. But in that case you have then to ask “OK, so what is the evidence that he did indeed exist?” … and there is, as we have all repeatedly explained, actually no evidence in the gospels & letters of anyone knowing any existing human Jesus.
As I have said before - that biblical writing could very easily have contained genuine evidence of Jesus, if it had been that sort document. But it does not actually contain any such evidence. E.g., there is no first hand eye-witness statement from any person who reliably claimed to know Jesus, and there is no indication of any physical remains or artefacts which could reasonably be traced, verified or discovered as support for a human Jesus … though of course, to the contrary, there have been countless attempts to forge such claimed artefacts (which in itself is just further evidence of how untrustworthy and filled with deceit this entire subject actually is).
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