It seems likely to me that Jesus Christ and Christianity was made up by the Roman Empire.
So it makes me wonder why would the Romans do that? Why would they give up their polytheism, Jupiter and his bunch of gods and switch to monotheism?

Dr. Bart Erhman has written an excellent book titled Did Jesus Exist? The book pretty much puts it to bed on an intellectual level.

Most scholars agree there was an historical person we call Jesus

and we all believe in the hysterical Jesus evidenced here:

Brothers and sisters have I some but this man's father is his father's son and his own father and don't get me started on his mother.

Who really knows if JC existed. It has been said, he didn't write and , he turn out to be the most famous person in human history.

Just way too over rated and the best BS story ever told.

Even if he had existed in the past, would it really matter when you compare what Xstians do compared to what he supposedly taught? The closest I can get to the idea of a supreme creator being is an indifferent entity that cast forth seeds of life and never looked back to see if they took root or not. The human depictions of a creator god are just ridiculous pablum for the brain and a security blanket for when things go bump in the night.

Quite a number of books document this problem. No reliable (ie Josephus) writing specifically documents Jesus. Once again, God leaves absolutely no unambiguous trace? So many of the previous mythical themes and pre-existing prose are mixed in with the story that one would be challenged to pick out a meaningful story without them. With the abundance of unincorporated apocrypha that also contradict the self-contradicting Gospels, you'd think something would have been recorded. The fact that the whole of Exodus appears to have been made up demonstrates the unreliability of religious writings to record actual historic events.

You might also enjoy the books:

Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed At All

Jesus: Mything in Action, Vol. I (The Complete Heretic's Guide to Western Religion - Volumes 1-3

Written by David Fitzgerald

I stopped caring years ago. If he was real and just a man, who cares? If was made up for Roman intrigue, who cares? Unless he can also be demonstrated to be the actual son of the creator of the universe the rest is pointless.

It is probable that a philosopher/teacher named Jesus did indeed live in Galilee 2,000 years ago. There are contemporaneous Roman writings indicating this is so. This is not a big deal. It is silly to get hung up on that point.

If Jesus ever were a real person, I look back to the story of the Buddha, who was a great philosopher, but after his death people added in a lot of supernatural stories with traditional heroic themes of the time to make him out to be more than just a man who developed a philosophy for living a good life. So, if Jesus was a real person, I think it was likely he was a just a popular philosopher whose story had stupernatural elements added to it after his death, most of the supernatural elements were taken from earlier stories, religions and myths of the time period, to try to improve on the story. The end result is if Jesus were an actual living person, the biblical stories are far removed from who or what he actually was... which in my mind, if he actually existed, was just a charismatic man with a radical philosophy for living one's life in that time period.

As the bible describes him as having "skin of ebony (black) and hair like lambs wool (afro), it is doubtful he was even actually Jewish by ancestry.

Here is a dumb question...is there a "written record" of Pontius Pilot ordering the crucifixion with the names of those sentenced? Or is it just "legend" like the rest of the story? I mean, to the best of my knowledge(and I am not a scholar by any stretch of the imagination)...there is NO record of any Hebrews or anyone named "Moses", or any "Exile". Again...everything is based on legend...the only hard evidence that is available is "The Dead Sea Scrolls" and any other hard evidence is locked away in the Vatican.

The word Christ is from the similar-sounding Greek word “Christos,” which describes the divine Son of God, the Anointed King, or in the Jewish tradition, the “Messiah” who is positioned and purposed by God to be the Deliverer of all people in a way that no regular person, prophet, judge, or ruler could be. This mentioned in the old testament(2 Samuel 7:14; Psalm 2:7). The character Jesus, was just called Jesus in the new testament, I believe there was a part in the new testament where some listeners said to believe they had found the messiah after hearing this character speaking, but it is true that Constantine started the trend of calling Jesus, Jesus Christ like if it was his name, of course pure bullshit, but they did it precisely to associate the new testament character with the old testament Christ, now even the term Christian which again comes from the old testament, is erroneously associated with Jesus, whose name was only Jesus, because of this imposition from the emperors who will probably cut your nuts off or behead you if you didn't use the misnomer Jesus Christ as one, again bullshit over bullshit equals bullshit, but try to convince brainwashed morons with facts and you know where that gets you.

Well, historians pretty much think he existed, but all that's known about him is that he was baptised by John the Baptist and crucified by Pontius Pilate. Everything after that was almost certainly made up, it's not like Christ said or did anything original. Less than 10% of classical writing survives, not surprising there's no mention of what would have been a minor dime-a-dozen prophet. It's all academic anyhow, even if definitive proof was found one way tother, it's not like people who believe in an invisible superfriend are going to be swayed by facts,

Not one single mention by the meticulous Roman record-keepers, not one for 30 years in either direction....but Plenty of iconic "miracle birth" & "resurrection" stories from surrounding cultures, in fact from most of them.
Just sayin'........

Hello and welcome, enjoy the site. There are a number of possible Christs: a fictional persona in writing only, the name of a real person attached to a fictional persona, a collection of old borrowed stories (Some true some fictional and some mythical.) attached to one name, a real person given an distorted fictional history, a group of people and stories all merged under one name, a bit of all of the above, a metaphorical work of fiction intended as allegory , etc. And I have heard good cases made for all of them. But after all this time, and given the almost completely lack of any real evidence or consistency, among the accounts, anyone who pretends to know is just speculating wildly. Though I will admit that the idea that Roman political propaganda was part of the mix always seemed very likely.