God is so quiet

[pocaracas]

"Aside from the people who wrote dozens of individual documents (spanning decades) about it, we don't have any corroborating evidence". Good argument!! The fact is if there were 30 or 32 books/letters, you would say the same thing. There would never be enough because you exclude anyone who believed what they saw and then related it. You are begging the question because you assume that if a person believed it, they have little or no credibility. 

You are aware that there were many more gospels than the ones that made it into the bible you have today, right?
What disqualified some?

Could the ones we do have nowadays have been cooked up from a similar social environment as the others, but they have the merit of conveying a similar enough message that they could be bound in one tome?

Not at all. Eyewitness testimony is ALL the evidence you can ever have of ANY historical event. To claim that it is not enough is special pleading. The typical response is to deny eyewitness testimony is evidence--and that is a crock of shit to go along with your bowl of special pleading. 

The problems begin when the texts we have look more like tales, than eyewitness accounts... even if the author claims that he got those tales from real witnesses.
Combine this with the knack they had to make up whole gospels and the credibility factor lowers quite substantially.

I don't doubt that such messianic stories were floating around in the population.
I do doubt if they represented any actual witnessing of events, or if they were just fantastic tales mangled with bits and pieces from regular life.

Not so. I listened to a person that came to my church last month from Iran that said he and members of his family (at a massive cost to them) became Christians because Jesus appeared to them (at different times) in a dream and they separately sought out underground Christian groups. Cultural influence? I think not. Go ahead--why should I assume he is lying about his experiences?

You know that Islam also has the figure of Jesus, right?

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And what are my beliefs?

The typical atheist believes that God did not create the world ex nihilo and all that there is is a result of time and chance.

I'd say that the typical atheist does not believe that a god created the world ex nihilo. If one did do that, the typical atheist would love to find out how that got done, if it got done more than once and how can we replicate it!