Existence of Jesus

[Mark]

You guys are a riot lol! Maybe the Jesus of old was actually an alien life form.Of course that would be hard for me to believe since I would have to accept that he existed in some form or another to beleive that.I am totally convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that the biblical Jesus is a fictional character.

In all seriousness, I don't think that Christianity is a much more serious insult to humanity than most other religions are.

I personally don't see much reason to deny that the historical person Joshua bar Joseph, known to the Greeks as Jesus, existed in Classical Judea and went about preaching. The Gospels give plausible accounts of him; he was mentioned by the historian Josephus; and it would be difficult to understand how a large religious movement enthusiastically devoted to him could have gotten started in without his personal presence. Indeed, it is so much easier to suppose that a real person was at the center of this movement than that one was not, that the burden of proof that such a man did not exist should really fall on those claiming that. This is not to say that there was anything divine about him.

I read your concerns above about the absence of any records, but I think this misunderstands the character of the classical world, which was almost universally illiterate. The Roman state kept records concerning its field of activities: the law courts, the system of taxation, the public works and the military. If any official record of Jesus had been written, it would have concerned his reputed appearance before the Prefect of Judea. Even if this was a court case, it would not have been one of sufficient importance to find its way into Roman case law, some of which has been preserved. If it occurred at all, most likely it was not a court case but a simple interview with the Prefect, which might perhaps have been recorded in his official notes. But to my knowledge, there is no surviving collection of official notes from any Roman provincial governor, let alone this one. It would be quite remarkable if there were. Indeed, the vast body of Roman state records has been lost, and only isolated examples survive.