Was Jesus a scam artist? [View All]

[Major Nikon]

Around the time of Jesus, the Jews were desperately looking for a Messiah to relieve them from Roman oppression, and most Christians seem to agree that Jesus was indeed that Messiah. However, Jesus wasn't the only person vying for that title. There were plenty of them during that time (as there still is today). So what made Jesus different, and why did he collect such a following? Well for one thing, at that time in order to establish street cred as the Messiah, you had to do miracles. Who was going to follow someone as the Messiah if they couldn't demonstrate power over heaven and earth? So in the gospel of John, it's written that there were so many miracles they didn't have enough paper and time to write them all down.
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%2021:25;&version=ESV

There is no other historical account of the miracles of Jesus. The Jews and the Romans were pretty good at writing stuff down, and particularly historically significant events. So here you have a guy that is wandering around parts of Israel (which isn't a big area to begin with), performing miracle after miracle, and nobody but the followers of Jesus seems to be writing it down. Some theologians have dealt with this discrepancy by saying the miracles never happened and they were simply poetic or legendary in nature. In other words, they were metaphors. This too doesn't pass the smell test. If they were a metaphor, why claim there were so many of them you couldn't write them all down? Sounds more like they are trying to say Jesus was doing little else besides performing miracles. Even if you believe the metaphor explanation, you still have to ask yourself why they were included in the bible in the first place and were clearly written in non-metaphorical terms as if they really did happen. You still have people today that genuinely believe the miracles of Christ genuinely happened, and it's not that big of a stretch to imagine early Christians did also. It's pretty hard to believe that they were included for any reason other than to establish the credibility of Jesus. So really the only conclusion you can reasonably draw from is was either Jesus and his followers engaged in duplicitous acts in order to gain credibility (which seems likely during that time) or those men who actually wrote the bible included them in order to gain credibility. Either way that makes someone a scam artist or the miracles did actually happen and somehow (miraculously?) there were no other written accounts.