Well I suppose if this was true, then Christians would have things kinda wrong. However, the stories about him are in the bible, and the books of the bible that talk of Jesus were mostly written by men who KNEW Jesus, so its not story telling passed on through generations, its first hand experience passed on by writing it down and sharing it.

Wasn't there a song, " If I were a carpenter and you were a lady, would you marry me anyway...would you have my baby?" That must be some of the story telling your talking about; Bobby Darin sang it... Looks like there's different forms of story telling going on through different religions, and song writers. Yeah, what if... ;)

Your "If statement" assumes many things: + Not one of the thousands who saw and heard Jesus in person cared about the truth and protested the lies + The Holy Spirit either does not exist or fell down on the job to ensure the Bible was properly inspired + Modern biblical scholarship is wrong and the New Testament writinga were written much much later than all the evidence shows I do not understand how proposing circumstances like "If this alternate reality happened then what ..." are of any real value to people seeking God and spirituality. With love in Christ.

I'll go you one better: what if Jesus never existed at all? The earliest books in the bible were written by Paul and Paul readily admits that he never met Jesus. Perhaps we really should call the religion the cult of Paul? Because it's very arguable that it would not exist today were it not for his writings. The first gospel was Mark, of course it wasn't written by Mark, but it was written after the fall of Jerusalem at the earliest since it records that event. Mark and Luke come later and although they have some commonality and a common source they don't agree with Mark or each other in entirety finally comes John which is hardly related to any of the other gospels. Add to that the more than 60 gospels that were rejected when the early church was forced to adopt a canon in the 4th century--certainly in the first few centuries of Christianity the child gospels were believed by most of the more than 2000 early Christian denominations. Funny that we reject all those gospels now. Funny that early Christians believed that they had history of the childhood of Jesus and we don't--weren't they closer to it? And by the way, outside the bible there is no corroborating evidence for Jesus, his preaching, his death, or his existence. Perhaps they'll find some someday, but more likely it will be faked like the later additions to the writings of Jesephus.