Did Jesus exist?

[Aegon]

And if any of them fucking mattered today it would be a problem.

You see, you jesus shits keep insisting that we should follow the "teachings" of this guy who you cannot show even existed. 

If Clyde the Shitkicker in Ancient Assyria did not exist, so what?  You have brought this bullshit on yourself by insisting that fairy tales are real.

Try thinking about that for a while.

Why are you so insistent on me being a Christian? For the fourth fucking time, I'm an atheist. Like I said, this is your problem. An inability to separate Jesus the man and Jesus the myth. If one isn't real, the other one just can't possibly be real!

Don't worry, before you say it, I'll say it for you: "Can't separate the man and myth because they're the same fucking thing!" Ha ha! Good one, man! Got me there!

IDK Aegon, if "accepted as existing" is in fact the only support offered for either jesus or -any- other character...are we really discussing historicity at all? Are you even disagreeing with anything? I also think that "accepted as existing" is how this historicity claim was arrived at, as I've said, a bare appeal to tradition.

It's about a disagreement over what constitutes evidence. People who don't study history demand better evidence, but the problem is 95 percent of ancient historians see what evidence we have for Jesus as good evidence. And it's not because they're Christians looking to prove Christianity as true. Ancient historians can be Christian, Muslim, agnostic, or atheist, but their training still tells them what to look for and how to find it in order to better paint a picture of the world's past. Jesus being a real person DOES NOT mean he performed miracles. Jesus being a real person DOES NOT, IN ANY WAY give the whole "God" thing any better of an argument. The fact that a Jewish man who believed himself to be the Messiah preached to a town of people and then got executed IN NO WAY "proves" Christianity, and I just don't understand why some people are so quick to ignore historians' judgments on the matter. Him existing =! him being the son of God and all that jazz. 

Again, it's all just weird to me. It'd make MORE sense that people were duped into believing Christianity if there was an actual prophet figure to base it all on. 

See how easy it is to create a religious cult around a living person, even in modern times: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2Cv5hZfOmk