Aside from old legends and hearsay, what do we truly *have* to support this theory?

I'm just curious, but where did you get Jesus travelling to all of these places? One, it would help support what you claim, but two, I'd like to read about it.

as far as the Christian scriptures read. no he did not

It's possible, but not extremely likely.

At Jesus' time, the Romans had recently gained control of the Red Sea coast and Egypt, and they knew there was good stuff out there. Within 100 years of Jesus' death, a Greek had produced a work explaining sea trade throughout the Indian ocean.

So it is possible that Jesus, being a political rabble rouser with the ambition of being the next Simon Maccabaeus, might have gone looking for someone to play the role that the Roman Republic had played for the Maccabees by recognizing Judea.

However, it's doubtful that Jesus would have looked in the direction of the former Selucid empire. Egypt was closer, new to Roman control, and important.

I'd like to think so, but even the 'Son of God' would find it hard to travel from the Middle East, to Britain to China/India and then to the Americas back then with no navigation skills or technology.

There could be like a New Testament spin-off or something, 'The Adventures of Jesus'.

Zeitgeist is a collection of coincidences and ancient historical myths beings built atop one another from civilization to civilization.

They resemble Jesus in manner only because they all knew it was prophecized that the savior of mankind would come in the way Jesus did, doing the things Jesus did. In short, fulfilling prophecies.

In my opinion Zeitgeist is for the gullible. Sure, if you're naive, after watching an hour of that crap you'll think that Jesus never existed, and that it was all a symbolic story about sunrises and sunsets in relation to astronomical constellations of stars.

In the end, you can't answer the main question, which is why? why go through such insane efforts to make up this guy == who even Jews and Muslims acknowledge lived and existed == JUST to tell the same darn story about the same fake, mythological beings?

Jesus was a real man. His name was Yeshua. He was a normal man, like you and I. Any power that he seemingly wielded when performing miracles was directly given to him by the Father in the form of what is called the Holy Spirit. Jesus was not God incarnate, and Jesus died in Jerusalem around 4 B.C. from Crucifixion for teaching against the Temple and leading people in opposition of it, while also making outlandish claims (to the Jews).

If Jesus never existed, he would've never had disciples. If this were so, Peter would be fictitious, yet theres a square at the Vatican named after him where he was Crucified upside down. Each Pope is successor to Peter supposedly. I guess the entire Catholic Church has the entire thing wrong, and not only does Jesus not exist, but none of his disciples did either despite plenty of evidence, and Peter was made up, meaning everything Catholic in Rome was made up and a bunch of hog wash. Suuure..

[edit on 10/8/2007 by runetang]