For People Who Think There Was No Historical Jesus

[Confused Ape]

But this is the very essence of the point. The legends are so absurd and/or obscure that no reasonable picture of the man can be discerned but he still "accepts that he existed?" Why? And why not then also accept all of the other gods who very silly men claim exist?

There is far too much special pleading when it comes to fucking jesus.

Why is the idea that there might have been a man who was obscured by myths and legends special pleading? It relates to the question of how Christianity got started. Was it an offshoot of an existing sect which had been around for a very long time? If so, which sect was it? Could somebody (the real man, not the myths and legends version) have founded a new sect? If so, maybe Christianity was an offshoot of that.

Richard Dawkins didn't insist that Jesus never existed.

Dawkins, citing G. A. Wells, sees the gospels as rehashed versions of the Hebrew Bible, and writes that it is probable Jesus existed, but that a serious argument can be mounted against it, though not a widely supported one.[268]

Reference 268 is for - Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. Houghton Mifflin, 2006, pp. 202–203.

I managed to find the actual quote although I can't double check it because I don't own a copy of The God Delusion. (I can't explain why the page numbers are different in the two references. Maybe somebody made a typing error.)

In Chapter 3 of “The God Delusion”, Dawkins cites a professor of German, G. A. Wells, as an authority on the historical claim that Jesus did not exist.

“It is even possible to mount a serious, though not widely supported, historical case that Jesus never lived at all, as has been done by, among others Professor G. A. Wells of the University of London in a number of books, including Did Jesus Exist? Although Jesus probably existed.” – Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, p.122

I honestly can't see Richard Dawkins being worried about offending Christians if he insisted that Jesus never existed. Do you think that he was going in for special pleading too?

I looked up Professor G A Wells

He is best known as an advocate of the thesis that Jesus is essentially a mythical rather than a historical figure, a theory that was pioneered by German biblical scholars such as Bruno Bauer and Arthur Drews.

In his books The Jesus Legend (1996) and The Jesus Myth (1999), Wells allows for the possibility that the central figure of the Gospel stories may be based on a historical character from first-century Galilee: "[T]he Galilean and the Cynic elements ... may contain a core of reminiscences of an itinerant Cynic-type Galilean preacher (who, however, is certainly not to be identified with the Jesus of the earliest Christian documents)."[1] Sayings and memories of this preacher may have been preserved in the "Q" document that is hypothesized as the source of many "sayings" of Jesus found in both gospels of Matthew and Luke. However, Wells concludes that the reconstruction of this historical figure from the extant literature would be a hopeless task.
The updated position taken by Wells has been interpreted by other scholars as an "about-face", abandoning his initial thesis in favor of accepting the existence of a historical Jesus.[2] However, Wells insists that this figure of late first-century Gospel stories is distinct from the sacrificial Christ myth of Paul's epistles and other early Christian documents, and that these two figures have different sources before being fused in Mark. Wells argues that Paul's Jesus was "a heavenly, pre-existent figure who had come to earth at some uncertain point in the past and lived an obscure life, perhaps one or two centuries before his own time."[3]In his books The Jesus Legend (1996) and The Jesus Myth (1999), Wells allows for the possibility that the central figure of the Gospel stories may be based on a historical character from first-century Galilee: "[T]he Galilean and the Cynic elements ... may contain a core of reminiscences of an itinerant Cynic-type Galilean preacher (who, however, is certainly not to be identified with the Jesus of the earliest Christian documents)."[1] Sayings and memories of this preacher may have been preserved in the "Q" document that is hypothesized as the source of many "sayings" of Jesus found in both gospels of Matthew and Luke. However, Wells concludes that the reconstruction of this historical figure from the extant literature would be a hopeless task.
The updated position taken by Wells has been interpreted by other scholars as an "about-face", abandoning his initial thesis in favor of accepting the existence of a historical Jesus.[2] However, Wells insists that this figure of late first-century Gospel stories is distinct from the sacrificial Christ myth of Paul's epistles and other early Christian documents, and that these two figures have different sources before being fused in Mark. Wells argues that Paul's Jesus was "a heavenly, pre-existent figure who had come to earth at some uncertain point in the past and lived an obscure life, perhaps one or two centuries before his own time."[3]

That's an interesting idea. You can read about the Hypothetical Q Source here.