Any Evidence For A Historical Jesus?

[King_Charles]

Also there is no evidence in the letters of the New Testament for an actual Jesus either. Because epistles portray a Jesus who never came down to earth in the first place.

I'm fairly new to the idea that Paul wrote his letters before the Gospels. I don't understand how that works out... Does that mean he single-handedly invented the name and character of Jesus?

When discussing this topic you really need to bear in mind what the study of ancient history consists of, basically it is taking one or, if you're really lucky, two extant sources referencing an event or person, the said evet might still be over a hundred years before the time of the source, and trying to squeeze every last ounce of factual inference that you can possibly make from them. Then throwing it away and arguing something completely random that sounds interesting and plausible, because you realise that about a million people have already used occam's razor on that one.

Also, references to miracles, gods intervening in human action were often a standard part of how people understood the world, Herodotus There is no direct evidence for a lot of historical figures, we believe because only one or two accounts reference them, and nothing flat out contradicts it.

IMO, if you apply occam's razor judicially to the evidence there is you will have to admit that Jesus existed. That there was a holy man/ mystic/ madman wondering around Judea at that time that got executed by the roman state, which sparked a cult, which just happened to grow into a big religion makes far more sense than a load of people deciding to start a cult on somebody who didn't even exist, I mean sure, you can think that the cult was created or aggressively expanded by Paul, Peter and James, that's plausible. But is there enough time for them to make up a whole life story for this purpose given that what evidence we have point to there being a quite well established cult by 64 A.D., still within living memory of the projected life of Christ, when there was record of them being established as far as Rome? according to what sources we have (i.e. very few, but there is nothing that contradicts it so we have to go with it given the sparsity of the historical record)

Occam's razor people, don't let us rub off on you and take leave of logic as soon as Religion rears its head.