That’s a good point. There is some convolution in Livesey’s particular position. Most invented-Paul theorists see Acts as a reaction to Marcion’s Gospel and Letters rather than the other way around. She imagines Acts as an early second century fiction someone wrote that Marcion then forged the letters to riff on. But this sets aside the stylistic congruities between Acts and Luke and has the order of their production backwards and complicates a lot else. It’s an awkward theory. To be fair, she only advances it as possible, not certain. But still.

Your idea that Christianity was invented by Paul, or at least that the Gospels were created on the basis of his ideas

I have never said this. I have repeatedly said the opposite. For example, Paul is a heretical transformer, not the originator, of Christianity; and not all Gospels are on his side: Matthew is against Paul and elaborately written to undo his influence.

How could Christianity have begun, and the movement, simply on stories about a fictional hero?

It didn’t. You evidently don’t know what my theory is. Who told you it was this then? Because now you know they lied to you and thus are liars. So you now know never to trust anything they say again. Which may be the most useful thing you might learn today.

But you can also learn the truth and undo the lies you were told by starting with How Did Christianity Switch to a Historical Jesus? But if you really care to understand my theory, you are going to have to actually read it. Start with Jesus from Outer Space unless you want all the academic detail (where all the evidence is cited and precision maintained) then you will want to start with the actual peer reviewed study On the Historicity of Jesus. Which incidentally agrees with you that it can’t have started that way (see pp. 54–55).

The rest of your comment is all off the rails because it is based on some lie someone told you about what I actually argue. So you need to rewind and start over with correct information.

Like the Qumran sect, the original Christian cult is an anti-temple cult precisely because it was still standing (e.g. Hebrews 9 answers your question directly). When it fell that only created a new marketing angle. But it was very specifically trying to eliminate the role of the temple in Jewish religion and politics when it began (just as the Qumran sect aimed to do a generation or century before).

For details of this, and why it exactly fits the context, see Elements 23–29 in Chapter 5 of On the Historicity of Jesus, which are all about this.

I think you underestimated one astonishing fact. The fact that no one remembers where the empty tomb was located.

I abandoned that argument decades ago.

Remember, before I became an expert in historicity, I was one of the world’s leading experts in resurrection apologetics. So I was well familiar with the “no veneration” argument. What I learned in addressing that is a series of facts that removes the empty tomb from being relevant:

(1) the first Christians (as attested by Paul) did not believe in an empty tomb, that was invented by Mark as an allegory borrowing the literary motif of empty tombs from other religious myths and novels of the time; instead they believed the corpse stays behind as an empty shell and the risen occupy a new body (I extensively proved this in a whole chapter on it in The Empty Tomb, in 2005);

(2) even if they did believe there was one, there is no evidence that belief was based on any actual knowledge of one: most Christians lived nowhere near the region and couldn’t query any confusion that may have actually existed about where the body ended up, as we know it would have ended up in a mass tomb complex owned by the court (I have a whole chapter proving this in that same anthology), and thus losing track of where it was (by accident or intention) is well in play (because there was no way anyone in the know could prove any body by then was Jesus, even if they personally were sure it was);

(3) Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 and forcibly uninhabited for sixty years after, so even if they had venerated a known tomb or loculus, that knowledge would have been lost even by the time Mark composed, much less by the time we have any substantive Christian communications a century later;

and finally (4) the first Christians expected the world to end “any day now” and thus would have not had any motive to venerate shrines (they would see them as useless offal soon to be dissolved by God) nor means (the criminal graveyard was policed against such untoward honors), and by the time they realized the world wasn’t ending soon and thus maybe they should start establishing monuments, the city was in ruins and no one lived there anymore. That’s why no Christian monuments of any kind were established until after the Bar Kochba revolt a hundred years later.

So the tomb is of no use to the historicity question. In Bayesian terms, Christians losing track of it is —> 100% even if Jesus existed and so no likelihood ratio from this can decrease the probability of historicity. Any effect disappears below rounding error. So it’s unusable.

And yet, all that said, I did in fact cover this in my original study. It’s in On the Historicity of Jesus (2014), 369–71 (“Both historicists and mythicists can adduce equally plausible explanations of it (though only by assuming the first Christians were not preaching an empty tomb)”).

The locus classicus is MacCarthyism and the Hollywood Black List.

That was the first concerted industrialization of cancel culture.

And that’s a fair take.

Indeed, I suspect that, if someone investigated it, they’d find the same pattern you did for the values of curiosity, progress, etc. that the Renaissance brought back. Just like the Renaissance and Enlightenment put a Christian gloss over ideas that had been antithetical to Christianity for nearly a thousand years, and that gloss stuck because their output was so good that it was propagandistically convenient to claim it, so too, I suspect, did the rediscovery of classical storytelling elements bring about a resurgence of telling stories about flawed characters.

I do wonder how much Christian elements did shift our culture toward a more-hagiographic culture in our assumptions versus other factors.

Of course, I would also point out that, even early and pre-Renaissance, we do have stories in the English corpus that have morally complex characters. Chaucer and Beowulf alike do that. What I suspect may have happened is that the bulk of hagiographic propaganda, of pure and virtuous Mary Sues, did warp the proportional expectations.