The end of the World is at hand.

[The_Truth]

Some do, not all. Atheists simply lack a belief in God, the rest is individual to that atheist.

Some atheists claim Jesus never existed, and that he was a made up character in the N.T.

Uhhh, no shit he existed before the gospels if he existed at all. What's your point?

Of course He existed. That is common knowledge. Jesus is the most popular figure in the history of mankind.

This little distinction of worship before it was written is entirely irrelevant. There are many old religions that existed before the written language, or existed as oral tradition. You just don't. get. it. It doesn't matter if there were worshipers before a holy book was written. It's doesn't make the religion true, which you seem to think it does.

Can you name a few religions that worship a holy figure 30 years before someone wrote about them?

Good for you. It proves absolutely nothing to us, which was the point of Void's question.

Of course it proves nothing to you. You guys don't want to admit the fact that Jesus was an actual person who was worshipped as God in precisely the year 33. Because this agrees with the New Testament.

No. You are wrong. The consensus is that it was written around 70CE. Unless someone can conclusively prove with empirical evidence that it was written earlier, which it hasn't been, then I'm sticking with the That consensus. It's only ever been conjectured with theories of the Q Gospel. That's not the standard of evidence we need to conclude it was written earlier.

At this point, it really doesn't matter if the first Gospel was written in 50ad or 90ad. The point is, Jesus was worshipped many years before they were written.

First of all, we disagree on the date Mark was written, of which you are completely wrong about, second life expectancy was much shorter in that day, and third and most importantly, it doesn't fucking matter because we have no contemporary writings of Jesus, no eyewitness accounts. That's a plain fact. If there were eyewitnesses, they didn't write about it.

It doesn't matter when the first gospel was written. We now have evidence that this Jesus figure existed in 33ad, and he had followers dwelling in caves precisely the same year he was crucified. (33ad).

If you can find conclusive evidence these cave dwellers were NOT worshipping the same Christ mentioned in the Gospels, then you guys might have an argument. But for now, I'm sticking to the discovery of this ancient cave revealed by modern archaelogists.