Not being a Christian, I won't opine about who is and isn't. But as someone who finds Hermeticism the most appealing religion, I am deterred neither by the fact that it is extinct (in a sense) nor by the well established fact that Hermes is a legendary rather than a historical figure. It seems sad to me that SOME Christians, Muslims, atheists, etc. etc. get hung up on the idea that if the historical narrative is fictional, there can be no spiritual truth in the tradition. You recently posted a story that two thirds of US Christians believe the birth narratives in the Gospels. Yet my understanding is that NO well educated seminarian believes them. From the pulpit of the Methodist church I grew up in, I heard in recent years the preacher acknowledge (gently) that the Christmas story is mythical. Years ago I devoured a dozen or more "historical Jesus" tomes and the bottom line is that the birth narratives were solidly and unanimously rejected whether the scholar was a Christian or not.
But these are mythical stories about a real person (Bart Ehrman is right that 99% of religious historians think so whether or not they have any supernatural beliefs about Jesus, which he doesn't) that illuminate what he means to people.
For a good while in Hellenistic Alexandra, anyone whose literary inspiration was Hermetic signed his/her work as "Hermes." We don't have to throw away all the insights of all those authors, just because they used a pseudonym of a Greek god. And we don't have to repudiate Christmas as meaningless or Jesus himself as mythical, to acknowledge that the Christmas story is a legend.
Believers who think that the validity of their faith relies on the literal accuracy of everything in the Bible remind me of the parable of building a house on sand. The historical accuracy of the Bible is a very weak, unstable, and unsuitable foundation. Just as the story of building on sand doesn't have to be inspired by a real beach house washing away in the tide, to express a truth.
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