Christian Factory Worker Fired After Pushing Anti-Gay Movie on Colleagues

[onager]

7. I suspect JC is a composite.

I suspected that even more after reading a lot of Josephus. He demonstrates repeatedly that rabble-rousing Messiahs were a dime a dozen between roughly 30-66 CE around Judea.

e.g., there was the "Samaritan Messiah," sometime after Alleged Jesus died. He preached against Roman rule and gathered quite a large army of followers. Then he led them to the Samaritans' holy mountain, in preparation for an attack on Jerusalem. (The Samaritans had their own god, similar but not identical to the god of their Jewish neighbors. Which naturally caused a lot of friction since there can only ever be One True God. Cough...)

If he was hoping to intimidate the Romans with that tactic, it was an Epic Fail. The Roman governor at the time was still Pontius Pilate, and he dealt with this insurgency the same way he dealt with all the others, according to Josephus. Pilate called out his troops, massacred a bunch of the insurgents, captured the Messiah and had him executed.

It's easy to imagine bits and pieces of that story, and a thousand others, being heard and incorporated into the writings of religious propaganda later cranked out to support the New One True Religion (cough again).