DWill wrote: I find it impossible to believe that someone decided to concoct this figure from whole cloth and set him in a very particular context within pseudo-historical writings.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/whole_cloth gives two definitions: complete fabrication; and something made completely new, with no history, not based on anything else.
I don't think that the argument that Jesus Christ did not exist actually requires either of these ‘whole cloth’ approaches. If there were a number of messianic pretenders or schools of thought, the unification of these stories into a fictional Jesus Christ is only partial fabrication. And it certainly is not completely new, since messianic yearning was expressed by earlier prophets. The longstanding desire that a King of the Jews would establish a messianic kingdom shows how we can apply to Christ Voltaire’s dictum that if God did not exist it would have been necessary to invent him. Christ was a necessary invention, as a way to provide a unifying vision of hope and faith for a suppressed people, an integrated way to express disgust at the evil of Rome and teachings about new religious ideas, in an evolutionary continuity with earlier expectations.
As to why Jesus was set in a particular context, it appears plausible to me that all of the pseudo-history of the Gospel biographies of Christ was invented as an elaborate cover for a sect who faced political persecution. Rome was extremely aggressive towards the Jews, completely banning them from Jerusalem and crucifying thousands of them. In such an environment, documents would be studied by soldiers for evidence of sedition, and the Christians had to edit their texts to conceal anything that would get them crucified. Fear of Roman proscription may well be why Nazarene was edited out and replaced by Nazareth, to produce plausible deniability against accusations of disloyalty to Rome.
Mark based his fictional Gospel account on Paul’s celestial Christ, a figure who never provides the type of instruction expected of a founder of a historical movement but seems purely ethereal. For Paul, Jesus is always explained by reference to scripture, with no mention by Paul of Jesus ever being in Jerusalem, Nazareth, Galilee or Bethlehem.
The slender reeds of historicity in Paul, his statements that Christ is born of a woman of the seed of David, contain strongly allegorical meaning that does not prove Jesus existed, and in no way balance the extensive mythical spirituality by which Paul understands Christ.
To restore any ethical meaning in Christianity, a prerequisite is an end to the hypocrisy about truth. It is unethical for Christians to cite Bible verses such as 'the truth will set you free' and 'I have come to bear witness to the truth', but then to apply such an appalling double standard for historical criteria of truth regarding Jesus and everyone else.
With history written by the victors, the actual Christian evolution from Gnostic to Orthodox has been turned backwards in church accounts. Recognising that Jesus was imaginary enables a clear explanation of Christian construction and evolution within the broad milieu of the mystery wisdom schools of Gnosticism, and how this framework was used by orthodox schemers to ally with the ignorant to obliterate trace of the real origins.
Normal standards of evidence give no grounds to believe Jesus existed. All the Biblical sources depend on Mark, and the independent sources who we would have expected to mention Jesus if he were real, notably Josephus and Philo, do not. This was such a scandal, with Origen citing the chapter of Josephus where Christ is supposedly mentioned but failing to notice it, that the church had to insert the pious fraud in later editions.