• This minor Jewish cult would have gone into obscurity if Constantine had not adopted it.
  And according to mythology Zeus married his older sister.

I tend to think of Jesus being more like Buddha. A man who developed a philosophy that was popular and after he died, people wrote stories that incorporated more traditional story lines that included the super natural and/or miracles, when the original was just a man who was a philosopher. It would be the people who later made them into religious figures. Then men themselves probably would not be happy with what people did with their stories after they died.

There do appear to be many common beliefs the Jesus story shares with other belief around the same time. Mithra was one but even Alexander the Great had stories written about him that he was born of a virgin (much more common in that time concerning heroes) and that he did magical things. I would be willing to believe that these beliefs were incorporated into the Gospels especially considering that Christianity took hold and was preserved in the Greek and Roman areas outside traditional Hebrew strongholds. Most of the letters of Paul in the NT were to people in Asia Minor, Greece and Rome.

The provenance of the Gospels is crap. The content CAN be seen in numerous bronze age pre-Christian beliefs. But the content is crap too, so what is the objective?

What if JC never existed? There is absolutely no proof that he was real. "Assumed" proofs are all, at least, written 100 years after JC's supposed death.

We cannot take it as fact in any argument that JC was around for some time before he was born. It makes no sense at all unless you are an Evangelical Christian. The fact that elements of what we know as Christianity is found also in other religions simply shows a similarity in religions.