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How Did The Legend of Jesus Form?

How did the legend of Jesus grow and spread to the point we now have a major world religion with over two billion followers—and little or no evidence for claims of miracles, his resurrection, or faith healing?

Chris Hallquist examines this very issue in a probing book, UFO’s, Ghosts, and A Rising God: Debunking the Resurrection of Jesus.

“One of the key factors with any legend creation,” asserts Hallquist, “is that people lie. The problem with trusting a story that’s passed through many retellings is not just that it might have gotten enhanced a little each time. The problem is also that the number of opportunities for a single, large instance of outright fabrication increases with each link in the chain of transmission. I can think of no other plausible account of how the bogus genealogies of Jesus came to be.”

Other issues at play:
• Human memory is fallible and can accidentally change the transfer of information from one to another.
• Natural distortions occur when an eye witness reports something.
• Those living during early Christianity failed to scrutinize these extraordinary claims and did not think critically with any particular rationale.
• People tend to believe an extraordinary lie than a mundane truth.
• The task of finding information on the origin of an obscure religious group a few decades after its founding would go from tricky to probably impossible. Little access to information 2,000 years ago kept people in the dark.

“Legends can form in the length of time between Jesus’ death and the writing of the Gospels,” concludes Chris.

“From examination of modern cases, we know that legends and hoaxes are not always as scrutinized as well as they should be, nor are debunkings as effective as we might like. However, the situation in the ancient world would be in many respects worse. I am not arguing that the Gospels contain no historical information at all. I am simply saying that whenever we encounter miracle stories, we should generally prefer the legend hypothesis to the hypothesis of an actual miracle. This is nothing more than common sense; once again, I defend it at length only because apologists try so hard to erase the sense of their readers.”