question for all

[Jenny A]

So I would like to pose two questions to any who wish to answer.

1.  Do you believe the person of Jesus Christ existed in history?  Why (whether yes or no)?

2.  Do you believe that George Washington was President of the United States?  Why (whether yes or no)?

The primary sources written by George Washington both in the form of letters, bills, even advertisements written by Washington are plentiful, and letters and documents to by and about him.  There are about 65,000 documents in the George Washington papers at the Library of Congress.  http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gwhtml/gwhome.html More at Jefferson's residence.  List of Primary Sources at Mt. Vernon  Many, many of those documents confirm his time in office as president.

There was nothing supernatural about his life, though as far as I know he may have believed in ghosts or horoscopes.
But we don't know everything about George Washington.  His childhood is much less less documented and there is a bit of a controversy of a cherry tree. http://carlanthonyonline.com/2012/02/20/...tree-tale/

If you really want to play the we-think-so-and-so-was-real-so-why-are-you-biased-against-my-Jesus game, you picked the wrong counterpart in George Washington who was an important man in the 18th Century. No one in the 1st Century AD, left us a record like Washington's, and it would be very odd if they had.  It would be even odder if a poor probably illiterate Jew had.   Tiberius (AD 14-37) would be better if you want to play the source comparison game.  The primary sources for him are The Annals of Tacitus, written about 109 AD, later even that the Gospels written about Jesus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annals_%28Tacitus%29  The difference between Tacitus and the anonymous writers of the Gospels being that Tacitus had access to and made extensive use of the Roman records.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacitus   And while not entirely neutral (no one is) Tacitus was not attempting to describe a god on earth though in a couple places Tiberius was worshiped as one.  None-the-less, super-naturalness was not one of the main qualities of Tiberius.  

So on to Jesus.  We have the four canonized gospels plus three others and the letters of Paul and not much else.  Paul says very little about Jesus' life.  He knows Jesus through the supernatural as he tell us himself, or rather as he tells converts in churches he left behind.  He does say he met some the disciples though.  The gospels are not really histories.  They are not scholarly works explaining sources or weighing evidence in the way the Tacitus' Annals are.  Nor are they remotely neutral.  They are documents meant to convert or to sustain the converted.  And unlike Tacitus, they often conflict with other known history for the period.

So did Jesus exist?  I think he probably did.  But I think we can know much less about him then we know about Tiberius.  Given the almost immediate casting a recasting of his message evident in the gospels and the Letters of Paul, and the faking of letters of Paul it's clear that his message was immediately in dispute.  Figuring about what Jesus actually said and did, is very difficult indeed.