[Disclaimer] - I am not an American and I consider myself atheist, I am Caucasian and born in a pre-dominantly Christian country.
Based on my limited knowledge of Christianity, it is all about social justice, compassion and peace.
And I was always wondering how come Republicans are perceiving themselves as devout Christians while the political party they support is openly opposing those virtues and if this doesn’t make them hypocrites?
For them the mortal enemy are the lefties who are all about social justice, helping the vulnerable and the not so fortunate and peace.
Christianity sounds to me a lot more like socialist utopia.
They aren’t much later on. A number of the texts are composed within decades of his death. It’s much later in that we have copies, and they definitely had some edits along the way, but they are pretty early.
There’s arguably much better evidence a historical Jesus existed than a historical Pythagoras, for example. Do you doubt Pythagoras existed?
Or even Socrates - we only have two authors claiming to have direct knowledge of events around what he said, and the earliest fragments of their writings comes from the same collections of texts as early Christian writings, and the only full copy of Plato is centuries older in production than the earliest full copies of both canonical and extra-canonical texts.
What evidence for Socrates or Pythagoras do we have beyond hearsay?
Which text do you think was written within decades?