Cecil claims in this question:
Jesus did not find Christianity as Jesus was a Jewish Teacher–a rabbi.
Christianity was not founded until roughly 33-40 years after his death by Peter and Paul, and they werent called Christians until much later.
And your evidence of all this is?
(19th-century Hegelian arguments about “thesis/antithesis/synthesis” and “historical inevitability” are not evidence. Working backward from the initial assumption that the gospels and the book of Acts are all lies is not evidence, either.)
Where do you get your information about the 33-40 years?
I know not everyone considers the Bible inspired, but the book of Acts is usually considered a reliable account of the early Christian church, and it talks of the birth of the church (originally known as a Jewish sect, then as a group called “The Way”, before being given the term “Christian” at Antioch) as being at Pentecost - 50 days after Jesus’ death & resurrection.
Acts 2:46: “So continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, they ate their food with gladness and simplicity of heart, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily those who were being saved.” This immediately following Peter’s Pentecostal speech calling on the crowd to “Repent, and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins…” and “that day about three thousand souls were added.”
Indeed. Some find it fiction. Others find it every possible shade of meaning in between.
What evidence outside the Bible can you provide? Using the Bible to testify to the truth of the events depicted in the Bible is circular, to say the least.
But using no evidence to contradict the Bible is no kind of argument at all; it’s just, “Believe this because I say so.”
There is an article in [http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060213fa_fact2](The New Yorker) about Mary Magdalene. It’s basically a study about who she really was and how she may have been the true chosen messenger by Christ himself. Men being men, basically dismissed her messages. Fascinating article that explains how the Orthodox Church won out over the other Christian sects. One reason was that some of the sects had more Eastern religious attitudes (Magdalene apparently recommended that people look within themselves for truth, sin doesn’t exist, etc.). But the version of Christianity that won out basically made it easy for the people. The people were told not to worry about looking within. In short: just listen to us and do what we say, and you’ll get into heaven. People being people love to take the easy road. Extending that theory could also explain why Christianity is so popular.
Here’s an interesting take on things: http://jesuspuzzle.humanists.net/
If you can follow his logic, he makes a pretty compelling case that Jesus most likely never existed as a living human, but was an amalgamation of: Scriptural allegory (the Gospels), mystical experience (St. Paul), and the political machinations of the early church, culminating in the Nicene Creed, which established what was orthodoxy and what was heresy in Christianity.
Declared heresy was the idea (popular among Christians in the 2nd Century, which is why the leaders made it a heresy) that Jesus was a spirit working in the middle layers of a Platonic sort of cosmos, between God in heaven and humans on earth, and therefore did not belong to any time or place on earth. Read in this context, the letters of Paul take on a whole different meaning. The bishops deemed that it was important to teach that Jesus was a man, a Jew of Palestine.
You lost me. Who’s contradicting what? Saying there is no outside proof of an event is not the same as contradicting anything about it. It merely states that doubt exists. Whenever doubt exists, the burden of proof is on the claimant, which is exactly the standard normally used here on the Dope. And circular chains of evidence are likewise normally prohibited here as proofs. How is this questioning any different?
The “claimant” here is “amanwithdaanswers”, remember?
And you also made a comment to which YaWanna replied to which I replied to which you replied to which I replied to which you now answer with a seemingly irrelevant comment. To which I now reply: I still don’t understand even your first comment let alone any of the others.
Your reply? 
But I didn’t reply to John W. Kennedy, I asked a question of amanwithdaanswers regarding his OP:
And I believe John W. Kennedy is, in the post following yours, referencing that “33-40 years” claim that amanwithdaanswers apparently pulled out of his…um, didn’t provide a source for. Thus “no evidence.”
I’m sorry, Exapno Mapcase, but even if you discredit the Bible on its spiritual/religious claims, I don’t agree that it is “circular” to refer to it as a fair source document of the events of the early church, any more than it would be to completely discount the writings of St. Germain (oh, I hope I remembered his name correctly) regarding goings-on at the court of Louis XIV of France, even if it is your opinion that the man was prone to exaggeration.
Anyway, the first “claimant” in this case is the OP - I merely provided him a quote that shows why I doubt his claim. But he appears to be a hit-and-run poster.
I should think it clear enough. He came in with a number of claims about history for which he gave no evidence, for which I am unaware of any evidence existing, and which flatly contradicts the only on-topic evidence that I know of, viz., the New Testament.
Check my post. I never said you did.
And to both you and John W. Kennedy, I repeat something that should be well known: to consider the words of the Bible “evidence” of the events depicted there, let alone “a fair source” has numerous problems, as well proven by the contentious Biblical scholarship that has battled over every point since serious study began, let’s say in the mid-19th century. The earliest days of Christianity are poorly sourced, he understated.
I’m not aware of any solid corroboration of Acts outside of Acts. Please let me know if current scholarship says I’m wrong. Until then, use of a document to verify the statements of the document is circular reasoning. Nobody is saying that a Christian church never existed. But clearly if the only statement of what happened in the court of Louis XIV, who would otherwise be considered a fictional construct, were in the words of St. Germain you both know very well that the events depicted in those words would carry the slightest weight conceivable. There is no getting around this. The Bible gets special status unavailable to all other evidence.
It is not “circular reasoning” to point out that the Bible is evidence, just as any other historic text is, and that, being evidence, it is to be taken more seriously than evidence that doesn’t exist.