Removing any religious figure would make no difference at all because none of them existed as understood by their later followers. It took centuries of argument to decide that Jesus was God and more centuries to decide just how he was God and it isn’t settled yet between Oriental Orthodox, Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic and all the Protestants that have come on the scene since.
Maybe there was a real Jesus and he preached a doctrine of peace. Maybe he preached the kind of peace so many fundamentalists do - the peace that comes when the Ungodly are all exterminated or converted and all follow the Will of God as defined by the sect. Maybe the religious figure of The Christ used memories of a noted genuinely peaceful Jewish preacher but if he had not existed would have just as readily used another, perhaps Simon the Mage or John the Baptiser. Mandeans do venerate John as the True Messiah and Jesus as a real man but false Messiah. ‘Christ’ is a title, not a name, so we could as easily have ‘John Christ’ or ‘Simon Christ’ or even ‘Appollonius Christ’.
The same is even truer of Buddhism. Literal history doesn’t matter much to Buddhists anyway and Jains had already developed an even more extreme similar religion. Any number of Gurus could have come up with a basically atheistic (in that if there are gods they are just another form of existence like ghosts) version of moralistic Hinduism for the masses.
In fact mythologically there are similarities:
Gotama is born a Prince; Jesus is born ‘King of Israel’.
Gotama leads a sheltered married life until he escapes and is shocked by the real human condition, abandons his kingdom (and his wife and his responsibilities to his people!) to join ascetics and then considering them too obsessed with trivial ‘self-mortification’ goes off to meditate by himself;
Jesus we know less about but he presumable does nothing noteworthy for 30 years and then goes on the road. Though he is not said to have joined and then left anything else, the is his baptism by John and his constant attacks on trivial obsession by ‘Pharisees’. Jesus does spend 40 days ‘meditating’ and ‘being tempted’ in the desert.
The similarity is more that while Gotama surrenders his kingdom and all worldly concerns to be spiritually reborn as the Perfect Man beyond ‘error’ (sin) to drag him back to further human incarnation, Jesus surrenders his life to be resurrected as the Perfect Man who is Perfect God living eternally in Heaven.
To me, it sounds a lot like the same basic story expressed through different cultural and religious backgrounds, the age-old paradox of Who wishes to live must die.
So I think no Jesus, no difference. Certainly (as so many authors like to imagine) no pagan Roman Empire unchanged into modern times. Everything Constantine did his Mithraic predecessor had done (except that Constantine undid the only {very sensible} rule of succession by appointment that the Empire ever had). Rome was headed to One State, One Emperor (in more than one Person!), One God long before Constantine.
Mohammed? Again we may know more about him. We know too that modern intolerant politicised Islam is just plain that - modern. Its earliest lasting version is Wahhabism going back about 200 years to an Arab Puritanical movement (often deemed heretical) with strong ties to the al-Saud family that during the 19th century became identified with Arab political ‘religiously pure’ nationalism against the relaxed Ottoman Turks and got where it is today thanks to General Allenby and ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ supporting it in the First World War (and then dropping it as fast as Bush dropped the Taliban when they had no USSR to fight in Afghanistan).
Historically, Muslims have been a lot more tolerant than Christians but they started from a position of strength that allowed it and they saw themselves as correcting where paganism had deified Jesus and lost his message, while Christians built up from one of weakness that almost forced them into a rigid orthodoxy.
Anybody else we might be better off without? I think more the other way: if Valentinus had become Bishop of Rome (before they were called Popes) perhaps the concepts of ‘heresy’ and ‘orthodoxy’ would not have become as strong as they did; if Julian the Apostate had not been assassinated, perhaps a revived liberal Roman Empire would not have lost its West and become an Eastern theocracy; if Charles Martel had lost the Battle of Poitiers, perhaps Muslims going North would have met Vikings coming South not so culturally different from them and the result would have been a European Islam less unworldly than monastic Christianity and more dynamic than even Spanish Islam - and without Jewish persecution. We might be 500 years or more further more advanced than we are (but circumcised :dubious: )
