The.Menace said:
I'm askin him what, in his view, is valid in history then, that's all.
Whether some historical person actually existed or not, or whether something is historically valid, has to be settled in the court of historical criticism. For most figures, such as Caesar, there's no question as to whether they existed, there's nothing leading one to believe they didn't exist. There's no coincidental myths that sound exactly the same as their story. There's no lack of eyewitness accounts and records.
Not so with Jesus. Even people in the early Church doubted that Jesus existed. The Jesus story has all the landmarks of a myth, so could it be that that's exactly what it is?
So much of Christianity came from the Pagan religion that preceded it. The site of the Vatican was a Pagan site of worship. As early Christianity became the dominant power in the previously Pagan world, popular motifs from Pagan mythology became grafted onto the biography of Jesus. Even Jesus' teachings weren't original, but had been anticipated by Pagan sages. If there is a real Jesus beneath all the Pagan borrowings, then we can know nothing about him, and for all intents and purposes, there's no reason to think he existed.
The Gnostics, early Chrisitians, did not believe Jesus had ever lived. They weren't even concerned with the historical Jesus. They viewed the Jesus story in the same way that Pagan philosophers viewed the myths of Osiris and other gods--as an allegory that encoded mystical teachings.
The Gnostics were later persecuted out of existence by the Literalist Roman Church, who tried to destroy all their writings. The Roman Church took the Jesus story as a literal account of historical events. This is the only reason we are having this discussion now. This is the only reason anyone thinks Jesus lived, or even places importance on whether he lived or not. If the Roman Church had adopted Osiris as their god, you all would have been certain now that he had existed. Because they would have taken that myth and literalized it into a biography and persecuted anyone who knew different.
Take all these Gnostic gospels in the news lately. The Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Judas. Most were discovered in a cave in 1945. No one reads these today and takes their fantastic stories as literally true. They are readily seen as myths. If the four gospels in the New Testament had been lost and then recently found, who would read them today and think they were historical accounts of a man born of a virgin, who walked on water and returned from the dead? Hello. It's just familiarity and cultural history that prevents us from seeing them in the same light.
Strictly speaking, there were no "original Chrisitans," but rather a continuous stream of Gnostics from different cultures with different experiences of life, all producing thier own variations on the perennial philosophy. Amongst some Jewish Gnostics a school developed which synthesized Jewish and Pagan mythology to produce what we now call Christianity.