Oh okay. But I think my point was in saying it was the same mentality, of trying to discredit whichever consensus disagrees with you because you are in love with your pet beliefs. She/he probably did it as a true believer against science in support of creationism, and as now a true unbeliever against the majority of historians to discredit them likewise in order to maintain the fringe mythistist view that feels better to believe on an emotional/faith level. That was my point. Why she/he would was because of 'true believerism', not the credibility of the experts.You asked, "when you were a Christian, did you call the majority of scientists who accept evolution as the "bandwagon fallacy" because they disagreed with your beliefs in a 6000 year old earth?" I answered you with, "Why would he? A consensus of experts is different from a consensus of faith-based thinkers."
That doesn't negate my point. Of course it was because others spread the teachings. But the fact they did, and the fact that they were picked up and spread, and received and became so popular, speaks to the actual source itself.Without Paul and others who decided to make this story into a religion, there is no reason to believe that we would never have heard of Jesus.
Now, you could try to argue cynically that it was all some slick modern marketing campaign to sell a mediocre product to the gullible masses, but that honestly doesn't really add up to the premodern, far more realistic reality of how things happened organically like that back then.
There was no Madison Avenue marketing team with degrees in psychological targeting different groups of people with slick slogans and whatnot. That's reading history through a modernists view, and just a plain sloppy and cynical critique. While that certainly does apply to these barfy mega-churches with their slick campaigns, and mass media appeal, it was a different world back then.
I would disagree they were ordinary. If you consider the time and context in which they were spoken, they were actually considered radical. Maybe they now seem 'commonplace', but honestly how many actually understand them outside of the cliches that they become through overuse and cheap platitudes?You mean the legend of the person. The life and words of Jesus were ordinary.
Also, same thing for Buddha. Yet do you call his life and words "ordinary"?
Yes, well, your readings of these things reflect your deep cynicism, and a bad hermeneutic. I'm quite certain you could distort the teachings of Buddha the exact same ways. You could do the same with the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, or even the with Sound of Music, were you so motivated to. I of course don't take such readings seriously.I consider the two very different. Buddha never advised anybody to pluck their eyes out or to hate their families, nor extolled faith over reason.