The Historical Jesus Sect

Jesus of Nazareth "most certainly did exist" - Bart Ehrman.

That's dogma.

This sect of Christendom also has doctrines - That Jesus was from Nazareth, that Jesus was an obscure apocalyptic preacher, that Jesus (contradictorily) was well known to be a Galilean, that Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, that Jesus instituted a ritual called the "last supper", that Jesus was betrayed by Judas to the Sanhedrin, that Jesus was turned over to the Roman authority by the Sanhedrin, that Jesus was crucified by Pontius Pilate, that Jesus was buried in a tomb.

The only difference between this sect of Christendom and the rest of Christendom is that in the historical Jesus sect, Jesus was only an ordinary man.

Other sects of Christendom have Jesus as either 100% God manifestation (as in Marcionism) or 50% God and 50% man (as in Arianism) or 100% man and 100% God (as in Trinitarianism).

Not all that much difference, really, it's the converting of atheists to this new sect of Christendom, called historical Jesus, that's the real bitch.

Jesus and Hercules

Historial people leave us with contemporary evidence, but for Jesus we have nothing. If we wanted to present a fair comparison of the type of information about Jesus to another example of equal historical value, we could do no better than to compare Jesus with the mythical figure of Hercules.