“Nobody knows who the 4 evangelists were, but it’s almost certain they never met Jesus personally and much of what they wrote was in no way an attempt to make history; rather, they limited themselves to reworking and adapting the Old Testament, since they were piously convinced that Jesus’ life had to fulfill the prophecies of the Old Testament.” — Richard Dawkins
If Dawkins is right, then we can imagine the following conversation…
Luke: Bring another round of beer. I have an idea I’d like to share with you guys.
John: Cool. What are you thinking?
Luke: You’ve probably heard of the Nazarene called Jesus, who was crucified yesterday. I think he’s the perfect candidate for our fake-Messiah project.
Mark: You only forgot one little problem: He’s DEAD!
Luke: Yes… yes, but that gives us the chance to control the narrative. We’ll be able to build him out however we want.
Matthew: Dude, seriously, who’s going to follow a dead Messiah?
Luke: Nobody. So we’ll start all this by inventing the idea that he rose again. We hire some thugs to brawl with the highly trained Roman soldiers, steal and hide his body.
John: Hmmm… but a hidden body isn’t the same as a resurrection.
Luke: You’re right. Then we’ll have to convince Jesus’ friends and family to spend the next 30 years telling everyone that he came back from the dead and spent some days with them, even if for that story to take hold they have to be beaten, jailed, and even some of them sentenced to death.
Mark: Awesome! And after that?
Luke: Well, to make this whole conspiracy credible, we’ll need details. So we’ll invent stories about Jesus interacting with people in specific places.
Matthew: If we do that won’t people want to visit those places and start asking whether it really happened?
Luke: Bro, you don’t have to worry about that. We can invent a story about the daughter of a synagogue leader who was dying and was healed by him. We’ll give the name of the synagogue, the address, the leader’s name, and we’ll say when it happened too — and absolutely no one, not a single person, will go to that place to investigate whether it really happened. Everyone will just swallow all of it as truth.
Mark: Yeah… seems safe. But if people are going to follow Jesus, he has to have a message. People have been waiting for a Messiah for centuries. He has to be someone worth listening to.
John: That’s a really important point, Marky. I’ll come up with some catchphrases.
Luke: Thanks, John John. Mark is right: we’ll have to invent sentences with great depth and wisdom and put them in Jesus’ mouth so scholars can spend the next 2,000 years studying them.
John: No problem!
Luke: Guys, until we’re done with all this it’s going to take a while. We need to start right now forming communities of people who follow Jesus, so that when our books are ready, they’ll be well received.
Mark: There’s a guy I know, his name is Paul, he can help us with that.
Luke: Paul, the Pharisee!? I can’t picture him getting mixed up with this kind of conspiracy.
Mark: Bro, listen. He’s my partner. I can already picture him leaving behind all those years of study, the successful career and the promising future as a leader in Jerusalem to go out planting small congregations of Jesus-worshipers throughout the Roman Empire, no matter how much it’ll cost him — beatings, imprisonment, persecution, discrimination, that sort of thing.
Matthew: Sweet! But Luke, can you remind me why we’re doing this again? What’s the end goal? After all… why are we doing this?
Luke: Come on, Matthew! It’s going to be so cool. We’re going to watch people be brutally martyred, and we’ll all know it’s because we tricked them! What’s not to love?
John: I agree with Luke. Definitely worth spending the next years of our life on. I’m in!
Mark: Me too.
Matthew: I’ll only do it if my name appears first on the marketing material.
Luke: Deal! Let’s start…
This text is sarcasm. If you can’t understand sarcasm, I recommend you watch a little of The Big Bang Theory ;)
Text freely translated from https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/if-richard-dawkins-is-right