Shit. What The Hell. Jesus Never Existed

[Mudhammam]

In the absence of any hard evidence, all we have is what's written, and there are mythicist interpretations that are about as likely as historicist ones, if not more so. The fact that you side with the consensus claim is up to you, but don't act like your position is better or more likely just because more people agree with you. Unless they're agreeing with you for really good reasons (which, considering the level of evidence, they basically can't be), the number of people who believe the same thing you do technically does not matter. For a long time Galileo was virtually the only person who believed the Earth orbits the Sun, and look what happened there.

The point is that there is quite a bit written, and enough to establish reasonable certainty that a historical Jesus was - as all of the earliest writings related to Christianity, both religious and secular, attest - at the head and center of a budding theology. The mythicist interpretation is only equally as likely if you want to believe that there is a special criteria for reading ancient Christian writings and a separate criteria for reading everything else, rather than understanding the genre a particular work assumes and analysing it as the author intended it to be read, per his explicit words or the subtle clues experts are trained to detect. The original apostles, per Paul and the early church fathers, believed that Jesus was a human being who died on a cross. Why? (I hear a choir of mythicist morons insisting that the apostle Paul was a fictional creation too). Even the groups that denied Jesus was flesh and blood didn't dispute his human appearance. The problem with mythicism, apart from its dubious ad hoc methodology which is inherently biased against all texts affirming Jesus' historicity (including Josephus and Tacitus, who remain two extremely powerful witnesses after Paul and Mark's Gospel) is that it has nothing substantial to offer as an alternative explanation for the birth and growth of Christianity. Contrarily, the historicists possess a number of plausible scenarios for how the faith came to take the form it did, and none of them require special pleading and outlandish speculation.