continuing from the third link....
While many people now regard Jesus as the founder of Christianity, it is important to note that he did not intend to establish a new religion, at least according to the earliest sources, and he never used the term “Christian.” He was born and lived as a Jew, and his earliest followers were Jews as well.
Christianity emerged as a separate religion only in the centuries after Jesus’ death.
Virtually all of what is known about the historical Jesus comes from the four
New Testament Gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke and John — which scholars believe were written
several decades after Jesus’ death.
- that's a critical observation. Christianity sat there dormant for decades. Jesus and the Disciples were "gone." Nobody cared. Then someone or a group decided to "study" this fascinating phenomenon, why 5k people decided to "give up everything" and become religious slaves to such an obvious fraud, who ended up trying to starve them. They concluded that the "son of God" story was powerful, people wanted to believe it, it grasped the minds of the dumbest of the dumb and held tight.
Maimonides, in his
Mishneh Torah, describes Jesus as the failed messiah foreseen by the prophet Daniel. Rather than redeeming Israel, Maimonides writes,
Jesus caused Jews to be killed and exiled, changed the Torah and led the world to worship a false God.
One could interpret that as the "reality" of the Nazarene, where the Jesus followers were "exiled" meaning they could not leave, and killed = starved.
