Political Memes

The first generation of Christians were Jews and thus wouldn't have had a Messiah coming from Bethlehem prophecy. The King David line was about 6 centuries old at that point, everyone could claim to be from it.

By casting him in Nazareth all evidence of him would be removed. Nazareth was nothing in the first century. Didn't even appear on maps of the area. A total blackhole. No one was from there and no one had ever been there. James could say whatever bullshit he wanted and no one could investigate it.

Now your last argument that the Gospel writers could have just changed the text doesn't work either. Since Paul mentions it.

Weirdly that happens in Matthew and not in Luke, and neither Mark nor John have a birth story.

In Matthew, in Luke it was for the census. They can't keep their story straight. Kinda how Starbuck was a man in the first BSG and a woman in next one.

What we have is plenty to say there was a historical Jesus (named Yeshua but whatever). There was nothing written contemporaneously about any of the illiterate builders and fishermen in the region, one became important enough that non-illiterate people started writing about him pretty soon after.

Paul's Epistle to the Galatians was probably written in the year 48, only 15ish years after Jesus died. Paul never met Jesus but it proves there were people talking about him pretty early. And he talks about meeting James the brother of Jesus in a later letter, and James' execution was mentioned by Josephus in the year 94, Josephus being a non-Christian corroboration 30ish years after the fact.

People can make the case, but people can make the case that Constantine didn't exist too. We only have so much corroboration possible so far back in history.

As for PARTS being fictional, haha yeah. Jesus only says he's God in John, the last gospel. Pretty big thing to forget to mention for the earlier 3. Plus many stories between gospels that conflict or at least get changed which is a weird thing to happen if both stories are literally true. And that's not to mention the conflicting Genesis stories etc.

Yeah I believe they are not entirely fabricated. There was a historical Jesus who had a following. A lot of the listed details are up for debate but the core of it is too hard to fabricate well enough to fool modern biblical scholars.

The Book of Daniel is from the 2nd century BC but it claims to be from the 6th century BC predicting events through to the 2nd century BC and beyond. One reason we can tell is the language usage and how the predictions are spookily accurate until the 2nd century BC and then they get way off. It was good enough to trick the people deciding the biblical canon so they included it even though it was written way later than all the other books, but not good enough to trick us in the 21st century AD.