How is a collective different from an organization?

Anyone claiming to be the messiah would have had to do miracles. It was basically how a messiah would validate his claims and not get, you know, stoned and left in a ditch somewhere. (and getting people to follow him as he massed an army to make a go at the whole World Domination thing.) the only reason we really know about him at all is because he annoyed the romans enough they got involved. (and that was less about jesus and more that the romans didn't like locals doing their own executions. leaving bodies in ditches is very untidy, and in any case, executions were subject to roman approval, even if Herod could have ordered it.)

In point of fact, the roman occupation and oppression made such messages very very attractive to people. Which, uh. made them very easy to scam. which made grifters pretending to be the messiah and scamming them rather common. Simon bar Giora, John of Giscala, Menehem ben Judas all come to mind.

Just like people claiming Trump is the antichrist is compelling to certain segments today.

None of what Jesus is recorded as teaching is even all that new. People have been saying that people should be basically decent. But what that meant to Jesus was something rather different than what it means to us. We read far too much of our modern understanding of things into the gospels. Jesus literally had more to say about paying taxes to oppressors than he did about slavery- and yet, slavery was such a common institution that he would have seen it daily.

He would have seen slaves on a near-daily, especially after going into Jerusalem; yet never once dd he say anything about it. never once did he go to a slave market and start flipping tables.

Suffice it to say, that if there was a historical Jesus, he was an ironage charlatan who was saying what people wanted to hear, in order get money from them. And you'll notice, they kept moving around? yeah. That's so the people that gave money and didn't get healed couldn't find them.

if there wasn't a historical Jesus... then whoever came up with all that shit is just as bad, and just as much charlatans. (and they too were faking miracles, supposedly.)

Mythicism doesn’t paint any better of a picture of whoever came up with the “teachings”.

Either way, whoever started it was scamming people. (I would suggest Paul was from the get go, too, even if Jesus was real.)

That said, if Jesus was real and he claimed to be a messiah, then he would have been expected to do miracles to prove it. So if the most basic part of his claim is true, he’d have had to do a little sumth’n sumth’n

k