And by talking about other people's burden of proof, you try to dodge your own. The fact that people making one claim have that burden does not mean that people making another claim don't also have it.
You keep saying all religions have the same kind of origin but then only giving those two examples. There are at least four different problems with that.
1. Combined with your lack of an answer when asked before about other examples, it looks like you're harping on those two because they're the only two you really have that seem at a glance to work the way you want them to, because by far most supernatural characters in global history
don't come anywhere near the same kind of thing as Jesus.
2. Even if we were to accept that the characters in new religions are always made-up by the religions' originators and never established religious characters or real people with new stuff being said about them, which itself isn't true, it still wouldn't change the fact that the originator (Joseph Smith, L Ron Hubbard) exists, and the "historical Jesus" idea is that Jesus was one of those. Simply calling him a character instead of the originator does nothing to actually provide evidence that that arrangement is correct or that the original arrangement (with Jesus as the originator) wasn't correct in the first place.
3. Xenu's role in Scientology is nothing like Jesus's role in Christianity in an way. Scientology not only puts Xenu in opposition to humanity/Scientologists instead of on the same side with them to share his wisdom with them, but also actually goes out of its way to avoid even
mentioning him to them. Before South Park did an episode making a big deal out of Xenu, even most Scientologists hadn't heard of him, and they
still haven't if they get their ideas about Scientology only from Scientology instead of from outsiders who like to focus on Xenu because he's an easy target. Some have even been known to say that Xenu
must have been made up by outsiders to make Scientology look bad, which they wouldn't think if Scientology were constantly preaching Xenu at them like Christianity preaches Christ; they're sure Xenu isn't really a feature of Scientology because they're Scientologists and they know from experience that that's just not what happens in Scientology. They don't get told about Xenu til they've moved up the ranks to a particular level which most of them
never even reach at all.
Here's Leah Remini telling the story about how she finally heard the Xenu story after she'd been in Scientology for years (most of her life I think)... and she had been fast-tracked because she was an actress... and even then, she was
told she wasn't required to believe it! Near the end she throws in a story about a conversation about Xenu with an outsider, which a higher-level Scientologist cut short because Scientologists are not supposed listen to that or share it. Scientology, as it's pitched to its own members or potential new members, is not about Xenu; it's about the self-help psychodrivel; it's a philosophical cult rather than a religious one. Just a few of them eventually finally get let in on Xenu's story as mere background, like a seminary student finally being let in on the details of the Bible's composition and the differences between different prophets' teachings. So Xenu simply doesn't face the "people don't believe big new world-changing things just because somebody told them to" issue that made-up claims of a non-existent Jesus would have faced. The closest thing to Jesus in Scientology is not Xenu but Hubbard, and
he was real. You're trying to hide the most accurate Scientology-Christianity analogy behind the
least accurate one.
4. It's not quite as bad with Joseph Smith, but he wasn't really inventing anything new. He split off a new version of a well-established religion, which is something that had already happened a bunch before for a bunch of silly trifling reasons and didn't take much to do. Moroni was just an angel in a religion that already had angels in it, preaching familiar old Christianity with a bit of new stuff added, nothing revolutionary. In Roman Palestine, on the other hand, a half-god who is also the pacifist Messiah, or even just either one alone, was completely new, and new revolutionary stuff doesn't work with the Joseph Smith & Moroni model. There was no prior concept of a Jewish half-god-half-human sacrifice to end all sacrifices. There was no Jewish concept of a half-god at all. The Messiah was supposed to be a fully human general & king who would fight off the Romans in an Earthly war with God's help, just like the Old Testament kings & judges, and would be a full participant in perfectly traditional Judaism, such as making animal sacrifices, not turning away from tradition or trying to change Judaism and claim that he himself had made parts of it obsolete such as by claiming to
be a sacrifice (after losing a war he wouldn't lose). And Yahweh wouldn't have half-human kids, so obviously the Messiah couldn't be one of them and anybody claiming to be one couldn't be the Messiah. So the modern Christian idea of Jesus is not only a combination of two impossible things in Judaism at that time (a child of Yahweh, and a "Messiah" here to wage a metaphorical war based on the afterlife instead of a literal one here on Earth and reform Judaism not save it), but was also an impossible combination of the two, even if the two components had been possible separately. The only model that he
does fit is not a half-god anti-Judaic Messiah or anything near it at all, because
there was no such cultural model for him to fit into, but what the oldest Gospel clearly primarily depicted him as: a "prophet" (or somebody acting like one because there was such a concept in that culture) wandering & preaching for a while til he gets stopped, after which his followers felt compelled to rework the story like a doomsday cult after the date passes.
That's a real thing that could really have happened and parallels things that have happened before and would fit in that culture; somebody simply making up a guy who wasn't there and defining him as a son of a god who doesn't reproduce and a Messiah who acts thoroughly un-Messianic and even anti-Messianic, and getting anywhere with that story in a setting where people not only hadn't heard anything like it before but had even been raised on beliefs that directly contradict it in multiple ways, is not.
There are two branches of evidence.
One is that the religion that traces itself back to him exists and thus needs an origin, and that origin being a real person or a few real people is the most plausible option. He obviously wasn't a gradual development from his own earlier versions like how Ju-piter and Zeus and Tiwaz and Dyaus or Dyaus Pitar all came from one Proto-Indo-European god millennia earlier, or how the original proto-Hebrew pantheon with ʔel as its father-king and Yahweh as one of his 70 children/followers had been reduced over the centuries down to just those two who then finally merged into one with two names. And the only other alternative left, that somebody just made him up in a setting where nobody would have believed it or even had a model of a Jewish religious character type to mentally put him in, but they did anyway, is sociologically absurd.
The second is that the type of real person who would need to have existed for this to work is one that is attested independently and described in enough detail to even distinguish some as being more like Christian Jesus than the others or less like him than the others. In particular, in Josephus's list of wandering Jewish preachy dudes, Bible Jesus's preaching and collection of a following whom the Romans sent a cohort of the army after (about 1000 soldiers) resemble the story of one called "the Egyptian", and his jail time & beatings & interview with the Roman governor resemble the story of another in that same list named "Jesus". (And, since the Egyptian is unnamed and is said to have escaped when the Romans attacked his following, it would have been easy to infer, whether accurately or not, that this Jesus was the Egyptian, re-emerging from obscurity, changed by his experiences). Anybody who claims Jesus was entirely fictional rather than based on one or more real person(s) needs to find a way to make these non-Biblical records of people who sound so much like him go away, but every time they're brought up, the response is silence.
For Jesus, that's how compressed the timing is, and I was responding to somebody who was saying that Jesus's invention was just like those of all other supernatural figures, which means theirs would be just like his. If Jesus was just a figment of some first-century person's imagination and that's
not how it worked for Zeus, then their origins are
not the same... which I agree with. They have practically nothing in common at all, so the analogy was ridiculous from the start. I was trying to get more detail about how somebody who
had made the analogy thought they could be at all analogous.
That was exactly my point about Zeus. Time alone makes it entirely impossible for Jesus's origin to have been like Zeus's as had been claimed.
No. That long ago, they weren't even monotheistic yet; most of the Old Testament was written in more like 500-250 and they weren't even monotheistic yet in that, although they had apparently gotten as far as henotheistic with a strong monotheistic movement competing for dominance. But more to the point, even after the monotheists finally took over, they had no concept of a sacrificial "savior" from sin. The only "savior"-like concept they had was supposed to
win, not lose with style. The reason why one of the Gospels is so obsessed with coming up with ways to say he satisfied Messianic prophecies is because otherwise he was so thoroughly unlike a Messiah. They had to try to convince people that they had misunderstood those prophecies and what the Messiah would be all along precisely because Jesus didn't come anywhere near the original concept (
it's really all about souls and sin and life in another dimension, not the Romans and getting to rule ourselves right here on our own land again; he didn't lose, he won by seeming to lose!). Jesus was so unlike the original concept that they needed to redefine the concept as something completely different from itself in order to make it seem like him, not to try to make him seem like it. If they'd used the Messiah concept as their starting point for a fictional character, they would have come up with a character who actually seemed like a Messiah, not one who was practically the opposite and needed excuses for why he totally was what he didn't seem to be. This is a clear sign of trying to bring two unrelated and even incompatible things together post-hoc, not deriving one from the other.
(Some of the "prophets" of that time might have been thought of as candidates for the Messiah while alive, but beating the Romans would have been how they'd need to prove it; getting stopped & killed was automatic proof that you couldn't have been the Messiah, by definition. It's just like if Uruguay ever gets invaded by Madagascar and has prophecies about a hero who will kick out the Madagascarans, then anybody who gets killed while the Madagascarans are still in Uruguay will, by definition,
not have been the hero of Uruguay who would have kicked the Madagascarans out.)
You write that there were other Jewish apocalyptic cults, but Jewish apocalypticism is not Christianity, and even the presence of people who were expecting a new leader to appear near the apocalypse
doesn't do anything to indicate that a person who was thought to be that leader didn't exist. It would be at least as easy, if not significantly easier, to convince people that somebody real was that leader, than to convince them that that leader was somebody you made up who was already gone without anybody having noticed him.
