Jesus and Peregrinus Proteus

[Giuseppe]

Analogous to Jesus in the Gospels, his [of Peregrinus Proteus] translation fable underscores the generic, honorific function of the tradition as set in contestation to Roman imperium. While likely abstracted from the overt political designs of the postmortem appearances of Jesus, namely, as they mimicked the Romulean legend, the Proteus tale allows a glance at a related incident, though refracted through the cultural permutations and evolution of second century Athens and with a Cynic philosophical subtext. By tacit associations between the two figures, Lucian's cynical lens regarding Proteus and the crucified founder of the Christians exposes several of the implied structural underpinnings and conventions of the prior Gospels as read in the broad Hellenistic context...
(R. C. Miller, Resurrection and Reception, 2015, p. 178)

The shock of the Gospels must not then have been the presence of this standard literary trope, but the adaptation of such supreme cultural exaltation to an indigent Jewish peasant, an individual otherwise marginal and obscure on the grand stage of classical antiquity.
(ibid., p. 181, my bold)

The Gospel Jesus and Peregrinus Protes have in common their being perfect mr. Nothing that yet are supremely exalted by use of standard literary tropes, etc.

But Peregrinus was totally ex novo literary invention by Lucian, without no propagandistic religious second ends. Behind the name ''Peregrinus Proteus'' there was not a Church. But Lucian invented Peregrinus Proteus as parody of the counter-cultural sects as Christianity.

I wonder then if what transformed Christianity -- the genuine ''shock'' of the Gospels -- was the intrinsic contradiction of a mr. Nothing however worthy of greater possible glory, the mere side effect of the application of the conventional cultural legends and tropes on the previous object of Christian worship.

In some way, I suspect that the insignificance of Jesus (in the Gospel fiction, but already in Paul, too) was at same time his major point of force, as counter-cultural iconic figure from the beginning.

Could that insignificance, that obscurity, his being a vanishing point, be already part of the original myth ? Not as modest corollary, but as constitutive of him?