That is a very interesting post. I am certainly no expert on this subject. I have read the Massey lectures that report a Yeshua ben Pacheria who lived a century and a half earlier than Jesus (Latin, sorry).
It was a common name. Yeshua ben Pacheria lived in Ashdod, and is as unrelated to "our" Jesus as any of the other few-dozen Yeshuas we know of.
We have no Roman records of a Yeshua, Joshua, or such being crucified during the assignment of Pontius Pilate to Palestine.
Tacitus and Suetonius are quite straightforward that Jesus was crucified by Pontius Pilate.
I find this very strange. Romans were obsessive bureaucrats recording all political executions.
You have an utterly unrealistic notion of what we have surviving from Roman bureaucratic records. The
Dignitatem ("military ranks") is helpful, for example, listing all the legions and major sub-units: but we only have one copy, apparently assembled from two different documents, one listing the western units as of some time a little before 400, the other listing the eastern units from about a century later. We have several copies of the
Acta Augustana, written late in his life listing what Augustus considered the major accomplishments of his life, because it was carved in stone at several locations. From Spain we have several city charters, indicating the standardized structure of local government, because for a while it was a habit to incise these onto brass plates. Once, we get minutes of a Senate meeting, on the occasion of the adoption of the Theodosian Code (the first attempt since the Twelve Tablets of the mid-Republic to assemble, reform, and systematize all of Roman law on every topic; later superseded by Justinian's Code), but all the Senators did was stand and chant in unison (they must have had a script beforehand), things like "All praise to the divine wisdom of our august emperor who has enacted such wholesome laws!" repeated a few dozen times; this was a special case (we only have the minutes because some copyist put them as a preface to a copy of the Code) and it was probably not always so "North Korean" (even late we sometimes hear of the Senate denouncing the emperor and declaring him deposed, as when the Goths marched on Rome in 410). Otherwise we get scattered fragments, and your notion that we have such a thing as a list of every execution that was ordered (do you also imagine that we have minutes of every trial?) is light-years from the truth.
However, the Romans did not bother to record the execution of a Jewish claimant to the Hasmonean Israeli Throne.
He was not claiming to be a Hasmonean; he was claiming to be a Davidite. A large number of other Davidite claimants were also executed, such as Judah of Galilee and two of his sons in AD 7, other descendants of Judah in the mid-40's, a "Yeshua of Genassereth" in AD 70 (more likely to be a relative of "our" Jesus than others of that name); and all of these deaths we know about only through Josephus, and scattered references in other chroniclers, just as in the case of "our" Jesus.
My own hypothesis is that Jesus was not a true historical person as described.
I'm sorry, that's just absurd.
Did the Zoroastrian Tradition not have Mithras, son of Ahura Mazda (Ormuzd) and Sun God? One version was Mithras was born of a rock.
The "rock" was a kind of Cosmic Egg, the primordial unity that was the universe until the "Big Bang" or "Let There Be Light" moment when Mithra emerged.
Another mainly in the Roman Empire was that Mithras was born of a human virgin in a cave (i.e. like a stable?)
No, there was never any such version in the Roman Empire: it first appears in 19th-century French anti-clerical writings, has been thoroughly repudiated by scholars, and now is found only on the Internet. We have been through this before. Mithra could not have been "born of a human virgin" because no humans (or any multiplicity of objects, of any kind) existed: his emergence was the beginning of creation.
Three magi (Zoroastrian priests) visited the son of the God.
Bull**** again. Mithra could not have been "visited by three magi" because no humans (or any multiplicity of objects, of any kind) existed: his emergence was the beginning of creation.
The Eucharistic meal used a solar disc of bread looking like the Christian "Holy Communion Host."
Bull**** again. The Mithraist communal meal consisted of beef and beer.
When they slaughtered the bull, the worshippers were sprinkled with the blood. There might be some symbolic resonance here with the Eucharistic "wine" but there is scarcely a resemblance to baptism (it was not a one-time initiatory ritual, but something repeated often).
They created the concept of saving grace
No such concept appears in any version of Mithraism that we know of.
