I mean, isn’t it classic circular reasoning to use multiple sources from the bible to prove the stories in the bible as true?

You’re absolutely correct. The stories in the gospels are mostly if not entirely false and are heavily plagiarized from earlier religions. I am in no way saying that multiple attestation supports the stories. For the purposes of this post, I’m only interested in whether there was a preacher named Yeshua around the beginning of the first century who was later mythologized, or whether he was a completely fictional character to begin with.

If 50 years from now, someone writes a biography of me that’s full of lies and supernatural claims, it doesn’t mean I didn’t exist. However, if several people write different stories about me (even if they differ greatly) independently of one another, it can be considered evidence (weak though it may be) to future historians that I did in fact live.

The fact that the two or three sources differ from each other dramatically, means that we can actually know very little about Yeshua even if he did exist, and this is evidence that the stories are false, not the other way around. However, they are all about a preacher of the same name in the same time period, so that is evidence that there was such a man.

And please note that I never said Christ. That’s an affirmation of a belief about this person. I only used his name. Even if Yeshua existed, he certainly wasn’t the Christ.

I think of these previous christ figures as proof that Christianity was merely beating a dead horse and Christianity only flourished because of its strict adherence to one god and the eventual sublimation of the competing polytheisms through coersion, deceit and eventually threats and force.

I mean, isn’t it classic circular reasoning to use multiple sources from the bible to prove the stories in the bible as true?

I would have to have two (preferably more) concrete, outside, independent, reliable sources in order to seriously consider Christ, and for that matter, most anything in the bible to have actually existed.

Obviously, historians suffer from these kinds of problems all of the time. There is also the big problem of many generations of fraudulent additions and revisions by the many who wanted and believed Christ to exist.

Unfortunately, I agree with those who believe history is written by those in charge and even modern events take on a whole new light when interpreted through the lens of other cultures and witnesses.

Of course, I completely agree with your arguments, and I in no way mean to suggest that either of these criteria can offer us anything more than circumstantial evidence. However, I’d like to point out that with the criterion of embarrassment, you have to be careful to view purported embarrassments from the perspective of the people for whom the myths were being written at the time and not a modern audience. That Wikipedia article points this out, in fact, and gives the excellent example of the incident in the apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Thomas in which the young Yeshua kills a playmate only to bring him back to life. While modern Christians find this embarrassing, from what we know of early Christianity, they probably wouldn’t.

When you start talking about classical polytheism like the Greek mythos, you’re looking at the “bad behavior” of the gods with modern eyes. I would hold that there is little or nothing in those legends which would have been embarrassing to classical Greeks. The gods in most polytheistic systems serve a somewhat different purpose than do the gods of monotheisms. They aren’t paradigms for human behavior so much as vehicles for conveying stories (sometimes with a moral, and sometimes simply entertaining) in which the believers can see themselves. These gods are often intended to represent the worst in mankind, not the best. The characters which are paradigms for human behavior are often human heroes and demigods like Prometheus and Herakles.

If you want to see a polytheistic god behaving badly, simply examine the Krishna legends. Krishna rarely does anything a modern Christian wouldn’t be ashamed to see YHWH or Jesus doing, but that wasn’t the point.

So, in short, I agree with you, but be careful with your frame of reference.