You misunderstand the context of the 900-foot Jesus example. First, the example isn’t mine, it’s PZ Myers’s. Second, it’s not for Christians, but for skeptics as a test of whether there’s anything that could conceivably convince them to stop doubting and to convert to Christianity. It’s a thought experiment.
My point later in the article is that Jesus’s physical resurrection is as spiritually irrelevant as would be a 900-foot-tall Jesus.
The vast majority of religious people who ever lived grew up in the religion they come to “accept” as adults. There are exceptions, of course, but that’s as good as a ceteris paribus law of social science. There’s no need, then, to discuss your anecdote about how you personally became a Christian. I’m weighing hundreds of billions of cases (including Muslims, Hindus, medieval Christians, ancient Zoroastrians, and so on) that fit my generalization against the anecdote about your personal church.
According to my studies of religion, religions work by telling stories called “myths” that contain metaphors that aren’t supposed to be taken literally since they’re about inner, phenomenological truths about what it’s like to be spiritually enlightened. Emphasizing the physical aspect of alleged miracles demonstrates a mere exoteric level of understanding of the religion, or what the Gnostic Paul would call a “hylic” level.
You’re just arguing by assertion, of course, but clearly Christianity does syncretize Judaism and Roman polytheism. The Trinity, the cult of the Virgin Mary, Jesus as a dying and rising son of God, the persecution of heretics and outlawing of paganism, what the historian Paul Johnson called the “total Christian society” under Augustine—these facts support my point. Mind you, as Richard Carrier points out, Judaism already had a concept of a dying and rising divine person before Christianity. But the Jews got it from paganism (from nature and goddess worship, and so on).
Do you see the difference between an angel predicting that a human couple would have a child (or between a human couple eventually managing to conceive a child after having failed a number of times), and a god having sex with a virginal human woman? In which culture is the latter more famous, Judaism or Greco-Romanism?
The Jesus of the gospels that were adopted as canonical by the Roman Church under Constantine in the fourth century didn’t speak out much against Rome. Historians don’t read those gospels as pure historical records, but mainly as works of church propaganda. So many historians theorize that to have been crucified by Rome, the historical Jesus would likely have gotten caught up in the Jewish zealotry that was abundant in the early first century, just before the Jewish-Roman wars broke out. That’s Robert Eisenman’s view, for example. Of course, historians disagree about what the historical Jesus would have been like because the pertinent evidence is so scarce and ambiguous.
When you talk about the essence of Christianity, you’re talking about the kind that’s become prevalent in the secular West, two thousand years after Jesus. My point is that Christians have been divided from the very beginning. Even in the canonical gospels, Jesus distinguishes between his outer and his inner message. He spoke in parables so the outsiders wouldn’t understand him. And you have Christian Gnostics with their esoteric interpretations, whose writings were excluded from the church that became the official one. Which message would more likely catch on with the masses, the inner, esoteric Gnostic one or the dumbed-down, exoteric, literalistic one? And which message is more spiritual and authentically visionary as opposed to being compromised by Roman imperial propaganda?
And regarding Gnosticism, what makes the Gnostics’ syntheses of other religions’ ideas “distortions,” and Catholicism’s syntheses of them proper and sacred? What’s the difference between the Gnostics searching for answers in other traditions to demonstrate their knowledge of esoteric matters, and the Catholic Church’s drawing on Mithraism for the Eucharist ceremony, or on Judaism and paganism for the dying and rising god mytheme? There’s no inherent difference between those activities.
Gnosticism did catch on, but it was vigorously persecuted and suppressed by the more pliable and pacified Church that inherited the power of imperial Rome. The Church was killing Gnostics into the thirteenth century (the Albigensian Crusade). Ultimately, though, a big reason why Gnosticism didn’t win out in the West over what we call Christianity today (over Catholicism and Protestantism) is that it’s hard to be spiritually authentic, and easier to be fake and superficial. Catholicism and Protestantism are fake and superficial compared to the all-consuming esoteric religious cults and subcultures. Mass movements must dumb-down their message to appeal to those who judge only by the lowest common denominator.
You ask why religious insiders keep their message secret. The answer was given at length by Leo Strauss. The truth of religion, to the extent that there is any, is in line with the most subversive philosophy which likewise hides in plain sight. Most people aren’t interested in being saints, monks, sons of God, jihadists, or heroes. We live out our days as deluded materialists or “consumers,” bound to our animal life cycle, and bereft of any philosophical or spiritual perspective. Authentic religion is revelatory or apocalyptic only to the extent that it clashes with such delusions and betrayals of our greater potential.
Historians like Elaine Pagels and Jeffrey Burton Russell have shown how the concepts of Satan and Hell evolved as the Church grew in power and used those concepts to demonize outsiders. This was the political exploitation of religious myths and spiritual visions.
Zoroastrianism begins in dualism and ends in monotheism. Akhenaten was a monotheist, and Egyptian myths were henotheistic and thus virtually monotheistic, like all the polytheistic religions that have been only caricatured by Jews and Christians. Read Jan Assmann’s work on the Egyptian religion.
