Why do atheists even bother about debating Jesus?

[Confused Ape]

I think was is quite telling about the narative are these verses...

I refuse to believe that a crowd of people who thought they were "in the right" would make such a statement that basically curses themselves and their children.
I suspect this was added sometime after the fact when conversion of the Roman citizens was desired. What Roman would convert to a religion in which the Romans themselves were responsible for murdering the founder?
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Very good point.

The Bible as we know it wasn't compiled until the Romans took Christianity over.

Council Of Rome

The "Damasine list" is the list of books contained in "Incipit Concilium Vrbis Romae sub Damaso Papa de Explanatione Fidei" (the "Gelasian decree")[1] represents the work of the Council of Rome in 382.

Other Christian sects were regarded as heretics and wiped out. The martyrs were then presented as being Roman Catholics even though Roman Catholicism hadn't been invented at the time.

Christianity only became big news in the Roman Empire because the Romans came to regard Christians as public nuisances.

Government's Motivation For Persecution

Once distinguished from Judaism, Christianity was no longer seen as simply a bizarre sect of an old and venerable religion; it was a superstitio (a superstition).[21] Superstition had for the Romans a much more powerful and dangerous connotation than it does for much of the Western world today: to them, this term meant a set of religious practices that were not only different, but corrosive to society, “disturbing a man’s mind in such a way that he is really going insans” and causing him to lose humanitas (humanity).[22] The persecution of “superstitious” sects was hardly unheard-of in Roman history: an unnamed foreign cult was persecuted during a drought in 428 BCE, some initiates of the Bacchic cult were executed when deemed out-of-hand in 186 BCE, and measures were taken against the Druids during the early Principate.[23]
Even so, the level of persecution experienced by any given community of Christians still depended upon how threatening the local official deemed this new superstitio to be. Christians’ beliefs would not have endeared them to many government officials: they worshipped a convicted criminal, refused to swear by the emperor’s genius, harshly criticized Rome in their holy books, and suspiciously conducted their rites in private. In the early third century one magistrate told Christians "I cannot bring myself so much as to listen to people who speak ill of the Roman way of religion."[24]