FeatherlessBiped comments on Tell Your Rationalist Origin Story - Less Wrong
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There were quite a few troublemaking preachers who fell afoul of the law in Judaea at the time, many of whom were called Jesus - it was a very common name at the time.
However, one of the big problems with assuming one of these fellows (or another we have no documentation of) was the human seed for Christianity is the early Christian tradition of docetism - that Christ had no corporeal existence at all, and was just an idea. Paul of Tarsus certainly seems to think along these lines, despite the later caution against said notion in John.
This also helps explain the curious lack of non-Biblical evidence for such a person, in histories where one would expect it.
It is often noted by apologists that scholars think there's enough evidence to say there was a human seed for Christianity. However, "scholar" in this context is a weasel word - most are Christians and theologians, who would have tremendous trouble (personal and professional) coming to the opposite conclusion at all. The epistemological standards accepted in Biblical history in particular are generally bloody awful and an embarrassment to other ancient historians.
For a pile of stuff on this issue I recommend the RationalWiki article, which I have worked extensively on. (One of the other main contributors just so happens to be an atheist who was a student of Biblical history.)
(I find this stuff fascinating, if only for the psychopathology. And, as such strident atheists as Mencken, Dawkins and Hitchens have noted, you can't be highly literate in English without knowing the KJV, much as you need to know Shakespeare and Greek mythology. The trouble is that ... well, it's like you wanted to study the Odyssey or the Iliad but the only people to learn from were people who (a) actually believed in all the gods named therein (b) really wanted you to as well.)
(Restricting myself to two quibbles, for the sake of time):
I believe your description of Docetism gives the wrong idea; Docetism (as I learned it) did not say that Jesus was not there at all, but rather merely asserted that his corporeality was an illusion. The Docetists did not think of Jesus as "only an idea", but as somebody who staged a form of divine theater, as it were. (Research "Christological Heresies" for more on Docetism and its cousins.)
Quibble #2: not all biblical scholarship is as bad as you say -- much of it is quite rigorous and would be right at home in a secular university anthropology department.