How many times are you going to ask me the same question and pretend I did not answer it already?How YOU arrived at YOUR previously stated personal belief Zacchaeus the tax collector didn't exist.
What methodology did YOU employ to arrive at such a conclusion or belief?
If you have a valid and rational methodology for identifying and separating fictional persons from historical ones it would be a valuable contribution to scholars of history everywhere.
And my methodology is implied in my reply.
Your methodology is: because there were wealthy tax collectors in these days, Zacchaeus' existence was likely.
Why don't you extend your methodology to Peter and brothers James & John, declared in the gospels as fishermen in the sea of Galilee, when we know there were fishermen in that lake?
First some of your numbers are grossly exaggerated ("thousands of plays, and hundreds of movies").But whether or not the author of 'Mark', (which almost all critical scholars agree, was not the 'apostle Mark' of the story) was well known as the writer of 'The Gospel which is According to Mark' to his friends and neighbors is irrelevant to the fact that the text of Mark's gospel is a 'prophecy fulfillment' theologically contrived religious fiction cult propaganda production.
Its a story that has moved countless hundreds of millions of hearers and readers to tears, So yes I'd say that constitutes a pretty gripping story. Over 6 billion copies sold, countless numbers of religious books based on that gripping story, thousands of plays, and hundreds of movies.
The success of the Christian religion has nothing to do with the gospel of Mark.
The gospels were semi-officially acknowledged not before the end of the second century. And the gospel of Mark was quickly supplanted by other gospels.
Christian beliefs, doctrine and above all the hope the Kingdom will come, and soon, and benefit the Christian elects, is what propelled Christianity forward.
Paul did not need a gospel Jesus in order to greatly expand the range of Christian communities.
Furthermore all the way to the end of the 2nd century and even beyond, many Christian writers and apologists made scant use of the gospels, some even ignoring them completely.
No gospel systematically say that all of Jesus' deeds or status was to fulfill prophecies.Out of these billions of people now, including me, how many do you expect would have a 'history' and reason for 'existing' consisting of little more than a succession of scenes 'fulfilling' hundreds of ancient Bible prophecies?
gMatthew is the most into that, but gMark has little of it.
These (specifically) fulfillment of prophecies is in:
Mat 2:23 And he went and dwelt in a city called Nazareth, that what was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled, "He shall be called a Nazorean."
The prophecies here are only pertaining on Nazareth and Nazarene.
Mat 26:56 "But all this has taken place, that the scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled." Then all the disciples forsook him and fled."
That seems only pertaining to Jesus' arrest.
Furthermore the claims that Jesus' attributes were according to the scriptures does not mean the writers admitted they tailored Jesus' stories according to the OT (which would be foolish & self-defeating, not what the authors wanted to be believed having done) but rather in order to have their Jesus & his attributes having been prophesied and, above all, not coming out of the blue, totally unexpected.
Evidence for that: either the verse(s) of the prophetic writing is/are not mentioned, the OT reference is far from being obvious &/or existing (as for Mat 2:23 & 26:56), or the OT passages quoted (some resulting from cut & paste) by the authors do not fit as applied to their counterparts in Jesus' story.
Furthermore, some of these prophecies used are clearly attributed to somebody else in the OT and not even prophecies.
In other words, the gospel authors "forced" the fulfillment of prophecies in Jesus' story. And not the Jesus' story was derived from the prophetic writings.
Cordially, Bernard