Shit. What The Hell. Jesus Never Existed

[GrandizerII]

Further note: the gospel authors could fully intend to base the story on what they thought was a real person, without it actually being a real person. They had no way to verify all the hearsay stories against actual events, except by comparing to more hearsay. And even if it did correlate with someone, it most likely correlated with loads of people and they couldn't consciously have been picking any individual one, especially since the stories were very likely to contain elements of more than one person. (Where's your evidence for this outrageous statement!!??! I know how hearsay works, that's what.)

How do you know the scenario you propose is as likely as you make it out to be? Please show us through the texts how you've arrived at this conclusion. If you say you have nothing to go by, then you are just guessing just for the sake of it, and that's terrible scholarship.

Also, when dealing with multiple possible explanations, the simplest one in line with the evidence is often the most plausible. We could have multiple things wrong about our understanding of various historical events that have occurred in the history of mankind, but we stick to whatever we've got until/unless we come up with new evidence or a more effective explanation that brings forth a more plausible scenario.

In the case of Jesus, based on what we've got, his historical existence seems to be the more plausible case thus far because his existence explains our current understanding of the history of the early Christians and their beliefs, and what we have gleaned out of the texts in terms of motivation and reasoning, better than him being a myth.

So to be clear, it's not that scholars (or us normal posters arguing for Jesus' historical existence) rely on hearsay here, it's about plausibility based on the evidence we have.

For the billionth time, I'm not denying there could have been a single historical figure underneath it all. I'm just considering other plausible scenarios. I don't actually care either way, it's just an interesting thing to study. I'm not trying to take anyone's historical Jesus away, you can keep the fucker

Why did you answer no then to the question of Jesus' existence?