Atheists being asked about the existence of Jesus

[EgoDeath]

Christ, you're worse off than I thought.

"Paul" isn't any more a real person than jesus was, lol. You referred to a character in a work of fiction as a firsthand account of another character in the same work of fiction....

Hercules and zues said a bunch of things too, also "well attested."

This is so far off from fact and irrelevant to the rise of christianity that I refuse to go down the rabbit hole. Let's take them in order from the top. We'll get here eventually, maybe.


You have no firsthand accounts. You are trying to certify mythology by referring to folklore.

And you wonder why Ahistoricist get categorized with flat earthers and holocaust, unsurprisingly there’s even a zeitgeist film promoting this idea.

Apparently non-existing people can write letters, and we can’t trust anything from Josephus.

The problem is, no one wrote about Jesus during the time when Jesus existed. All historical writings about Jesus are posthumous; they were written long after he was dead. I'd have to imagine that such an insanely influential figure would've been written about during his life, while he was still alive, by a multitude of people. Instead, we have a small handful of writings about him, some which don't even actually mention him by name (references to Chrestos in some writings), that were all written well after the man was supposedly killed.

Obviously, no serious historian considers the Bible a reliable, historical sourcework. There may be bits and pieces of true information sprinkled throughout the Bible - maybe - but it is mostly a pile of poorly written nonsense. The fact is, despite the "consensus" that exists among historians, the evidence for the existence of Jesus is truly lackluster and doesn't do much to convince me, personally. Hell, if it convinces you, I got some beachfront property to sell you in Idaho. The beautiful thing is that facts, if thought to be incorrect, can be questioned by anyone using logic and research. I don't have to be a historian to understand that the evidence of a historical Jesus is underwhelming, at best. Your characterization of people who deny the historicity of Jesus as being akin to flat-earthers or Holocaust-deniers is totally unfounded and completely off-base.

I think prominent atheist figures avoid debate on this topic because the real answer is mostly inconsequential. The consensus that exists that simply accepts Jesus as a real man, may very well exist simply because Western society has quite a religious bent, and I think most people, even atheists, figure, "Hell, if the historians say he was real, I guess he was real." And maybe it's not questioned so much because the existence of Jesus would do nothing to prove the case for Christianity as a religion. The fantastical claims made by the Bible wouldn't be rectified if we suddenly learned that Jesus was, in fact, real. It kind of doesn't even matter.

So... Was Jesus a real man? Maybe. I'm not entirely convinced, but as others have said in this thread, it's certainly possible. It's also possible that King Arthur was real, or Beowulf. Who knows? Who cares?