Late Bronze Age Collapse

> The conversion of the Romans to Christianity happened because of real events

Yeah, and in the process of converting to Christianity, Romans began rewriting their history and erasing their past. Which is exactly what we are talking about right now. You claimed "The idea that some random historian or politician simply convinced everyone his fiction story was true and central to their identity - and it worked time after time AND everyone else bought into it - is clearly absurd." And I'm giving you clear historic examples where exactly that happened. But now you want to make it about whether or not the people that did that existed or not.

> Or are you saying there was never any man named Jesus who was crucified?

Likely a man named Jesus existed because we have non-biblical documents from the time period (Josephus and the Sanhedrin) recording that he existed. Further, there are parts of the biblical narrative that are indicative that he was a real person. The census story in Luke, for example, is a convoluted story that you'd only tell if there was a real problem with Jesus, that he was well known to be from Nazareth and not Bethlehem. Were Jesus a complete myth there's no reason the gospel author wouldn't just say "And he was born in Bethlehem as prophesied"

> I guess you may as well argue that - both him and Paul could have been invented.

Again, nope, because we actually have a fair bit of contemporary documents about the existence of both. Something we don't have for Romulus.

> used incorporated what he knew of what he believed to be true history.

Right, I'm not arguing about Mohamed existing, I'm arguing that he made up history which people believed. Or more precisely, his followers did. Mohammad was illiterate and the Quran was written some 50 years after he died.

> I think Joseph Smith is rather too well attested to claim he did not exist.

Joseph claimed to be a historian who documented the events of the ancient americas. He claimed to have found records of those events and "transcribed" a book.

Quite similar to Romulus. And as it turns out, yeah, an entire religion of people believe him that Mormon and Moroni, Nephi and Lehi are all real people that really existed.

I mean, almost uncannily, the events he wrote about were 1000 years in the past from him.

At least it medaled. The same can't be said for the information age.

Interestingly we have surviving Hittite letters complaining about the Achaeans causing some trouble in the vicinity of Troy along with a guy whose name sounds very similar to Priam (although he actually seems to have been on the Greek side). And we somewhat confidently know that Troy had a king named Alexander (Alakasandu) which happens to be the Greek name of Paris (of course there were probably many Trojan kings carrying that name over the years).

Of course that doesn't mean much, the Iliad is a mishmash of different historical events from different periods (based on the descriptions of weapons, armour, political systems, cities etc.). There is probably a massive accuracy gap between oral history like the Iliad and written one (including the Hebrew bible).

> The idea that some random historian or politician simply convinced everyone his fiction story

Not on purpose, it's just that without written history it's very easy for stories to drift very far from the historical facts. There might haven been a Roman king Romulus who did something important (then again he might have been created over time by merging several figures - i.e. it's more likely that he was named after the city and not the other way around).

We actually have real documented historical cases of this process occurring, the whole genre of Germanic heroic legends. They include various historical figures like Theodoric, Attila the Hun and others but the actual facts were mostly corrupted beyond recognition. Also this process took 500-800 years and developed in environment in which existing historical written sources on the same events did exist (even if they weren't directly accessible to most).

> Romans began rewriting their history and erasing their past. Which is exactly what we are talking about right now.

I'm not sure that's true. Of course some some details might have been purposefully (or not) ignored or twisted. While obviously Christian scholars were quite picky on which pagan texts to preserve or not (due to various reasons) there is not a lot reason to believe that generally they did their best to copy them faithfully. Of course we are talking about a highly literate society with a strong tradition of analytical history (which was very unique by pre-medieval standards at least).

> Quite similar to Romulus

The claim that some specific historian might have invented him out of thin air is far fetched and not really substantiated. Much more likely that the legend evolved over many generations and became a mishmash of fact and fiction over hundreds of years before someone actually wrote it down. Based on other similar cases it's highly likely that there were many competing traditions by Livy's time. So yes, he did very likely tried to reconcile them and picked how to synthesize the narrative but it's hard to imagine he could have actually invented it because there were plenty of people and other historians who could have called him out on it.