Rageforthemachine said

So the question is, was there anything really special or unique about Jesus? Does he in any way, even as a man, merit a special place in history? Or does the Jesus story say much more about huIf manity’s Life Of Brianesque ways of interpreting the world and creating our stories? 

I think there are several dimensions to this question.

It seems doubtful that Jesus had as large a following during his lifetime than is attested by the Gospels.  But he apparently had attracted at least enough attention to make the Temple and Roman authorities sufficiently nervous to execute him.  And after his execution, which in other cases could easily lead to a following’s disappearance, the movement about him grew and spread rather rapidly.  To those who encountered him during his lifetime, both friends and foes, he must have been a compelling figure.

It’s surely the case that it is in the nature of human beings to create stories that give their lives meaning, and one sees that happening in many different ways in the early Christian tradition.  But the stories really only succeed to the degree that Christianity did if the meanings that could be generated from them spoke to some powerful needs in human beings, and made them as you say, willing to die–and kill–for them.  In one historical sense, I am far more impressed with the writers and missionaries who invented and elaborated the Christian story in the first two centuries of the common era than I am with Jesus himself.  They took a brief ministry that ended tragically and made into a religion that has spanned the globe for two millennia.  Regardless of whether one believes in Christianity or not, that accomplishment by the first two centuries of Christians took both some genius and some real courage.  It’s not as if people were destined to believe what they were saying from the beginning, and it certainly is not the case that the movement was in any sense predestined to survive.  So, in one sense, Jesus of Nazareth does deserve his station in world history, since, whatever is the truth of his life and death, his personage inspired a religion that has made him the most significant figure of “Western” civilisation in the last two thousand years.  It’s not the case that just anyone can lay claim to such a legacy.  

In terms of his own accomplishments during his lifetime, there is a good chance that they were quite modest at best.  By comparison, Gandhi could be considered to have been far, far more influential during his lifetime than Jesus.