That's what you and the Christian scholars are doing to argue for Jesus. The only difference is that you believe one and not the other.
Right. Because the NT was composed by maybe one person or maybe more than one, composed several centuries after Jesus, and then written down a few centuries after that. Only it wasn't.
There is no miracle or legend in the NT that hasn't been said of historical people, from Alexander the Great and the Caesars to
Tafari Makonnen/Haile Selassie. The article is not a particularly well-argued thesis, but it does highlight the importance of differentiating between myth, legend, magic, etc., and historical accounts of these. Haile Selassie was definitely a real, historical person, and so was Marcus Garvey. The Rastafarian movement/religion definitely existed as well, and definitely deified the emperor Selassie. Garvey was the prophet who foretold of this particular messiah.
"For the followers of the Rastafari religion, however, Selassie is a figure of devotion whose hagiography bears almost no relation to the historical figure, and even within his own lifetime Selassie was hailed by thousands as living incarnation of God. Indeed, for Rastafarians, Selassie was 'the Almighty on earth in the flesh of Man', 'the head of creation', 'the God of all ages', 'immortal', 'omnipotent', and 'the world's greatest political leader of the twentieth century' whose 'works for the unification of humankind, equal rights and justice are unparalleled'."
On Groundation Day, we are told "Brother George Huggins of Accompong, explained the enthusiastic welcome, 'it is hard to put in words what seeing this man, this great man, the Lord of lords, in Jamaica meant to us in the Rastafarian community. We had heard so much about him for so long.' On the tarmac, some waved palm leaves, some red, green and gold Ethiopian flags, and some blew the Maroon cowhorn known as the abeng in welcome. Everyone kept their eyes on the sky wondering when the plane carrying His Imperial Majesty from Trinidad and Tobago would arrive. Rain began to fall and the crowd continued to wait, hoping even for just a glimpse of the plane through the thick clouds that had formed.
When the insignia of a roaring lion and stripes of red, green and gold finally came into view, the rain stopped. People shouted, 'See how God stop de rain'. The sound from the crowd was deafening as masses of people rushed to get closer to the island's distinguished visitor. The crowd simply broke down any barriers that stood in their way in their eagerness to position themselves as close as possible to the 'King of Kings'."
Some believe he did not die, or rose from the dead, among the many other miracles he is said to have performed. The difference is that this happened mainly last century, when we had cameras and reporters and video cameras and radios and all kinds of evidence that this was a real human person whom other hailed as a messianic savior figure who worked wonders and was divine.
Nor is this the only person who has existed and been credited with supernatural powers. We have thousands of records in multiple languages from the days of the European witch-trials, and many of them are trial records. These accused witches were real human beings who were often brutally tortured before being executed. But their crimes involved supernatural feats and congress with the devil. Once again, we have historical people credited with the impossible.
The difference between the various historians who think there is something really historical about the Iliad and those who think that we can be sure Jesus existed are numerous. We have lots of records of cult leaders, prophets, wonder-workers, magi, wise ones, etc., across cultures and time. We not only have the Iliad, but commentaries, quotations, and even philosophical discourse about the epic from various authors in antiquity. For example, there are a few words in Homer that appear nowhere else in Greek literature, and we aren't quite sure what they mean. But we know that the Greeks of the fifth century and later didn't know either and did some
ad hoc etymology to come up with what are almost certainly wrong answers. The Homeridae were professional "homericists" who recited the Homeric epics as a profession. The question is "how do we explain the evidences we have in the most plausible way?" For the Iliad, where we don't even know when it was composed, by whom, or how long before it was written down and how separated it is from the events it describes, and when we compare it with other cross-cultural epics we find similarities (meter and/or rhyme, stock phrases, epitaphs, etc.). So we really have no evidence about what is described other than the Iliad itself and what little we can glean from later sources, archaeology, and anthropology. But we do have evidence that this type of composition is a common cross-cultural one, and is neither intended to be history nor usually reflects any historical reality at all.
This is not true of Jesus. We are dealing with some anonymous authors and Paul, but we aren't dealing with some legendary past with legendary heroes written in a formulaic poetic style. We're dealing primarily with four ancient historiographical texts and a few other references all within the same century. Instead of lists of Athenian and Trojan heroes (Achilles, Hector, Paris, Ajax, Agamemnon, etc.) we find people attested to elsewhere. John the Baptist is described in Josephus. Pilate is described by Philo and we even have that infamous inscription. Caiaphas we now quite well thanks mainly to Josephus. Galilee, Jerusalem, Capernaum, etc., are real places. Our earliest evidence is letters sent to established Churches by a guy who was contemporary with Jesus, who knew enough about the Jesus followers to persecute them, and who travelled in addition to writing letters. This all started a few years after Jesus was executed. How is that, in a Hellenistic world where one of the few constants is kinship social structures tying every individual to a vast number of others and in which the spoken word was held to be more reliable than the written. This was true even among "people of the book". The origins of the Mishnah certainly go back to before Jesus, but they weren't written down until c. 200. The teacher of righteousness we know of only through the Qumran scrolls, Paul we know only through Acts and his letters.
Jewish religion is marked by a increasing monotheism, in which other gods become secondary and the imaginary over the years. So how did a Jewish movement spring up out of nowhere with a messianic figure who is described in detail and in terms of the places he went and people of note he ran into such that Paul can write to early Christians in places across the Roman empire, yet nobody thought to "hey, wait a minute. Your saying this is God's messiah? Says who?" Where did these pockets of early Christians come from? Jews just started to decide one day "hey, I'm bored with this monotheism stuff. Let's throw in a nebulous, divine-like figure and make thing interesting" and people all around Jerusalem and elsewhere simply said "great! sounds good." And when Nero blamed Christians for the fires, and when they were persecuted, they decided that this newly adopted religion that came out of nowhere was worth dying for?
If you remove Jesus from the equation, you're left with a great deal of evidence for a Jewish movement that, even though it separated from Judaism, so tied itself to Jewish scriptures that those, like Marcion, who sought to reject the Jewish god and the Jewish scriptures were held to be heretics. You're left with a religious movement persecuted first by other Jews like Paul and then by Romans that came from nowhere, has no parallels except in other historical leaders of movements, and a host of texts more numerous than for emperors all saying this one person, this Jesus of Nazareth the messiah, is their origin, but no Jesus to be that origin.
