The (non) existence of Jesus

[CapnAwesome]

Jesus existing is sort of a misnomer to start with. Take someone like Bart Erhman who believes in a historical Jesus, but doesn't believe in the resurrection, that he walked on water, that he did any of the miracles associated with him? What you have is a person who lived around 30 AD, preached a form of Judaism, possibly claimed to be the Messiah and was killed by the Romans. If that person existed is it really fair to even say that they were 'Jesus' without all the other attributes attached to them. At the best you could say that there was someone that Jesus was based on. To me it becomes an irrelevant question whether or not Jesus of the bible is loosely based on a real person.

However those in the 'Jesus never existed' camp don't do themselves much of a favor with the historical community by making some extremely poor arguments. Mostly to do with primary sources. Yeah, Jesus doesn't have any primary sources but neither do a lot of well established historical figures. Aristotle doesn't have any either. Neither does Ghenghis Khan, who conquered half the world. No primary sources at all yet no credible historian would at all question the existence of Ghenghis Khan. We are talking about a time when there was mass illiteracy and the only people really writing stuff down were professional scholars and sages. It's not like people in the extreme backwater of the Roman empire were keeping diaries, nor are they likely to have survived. Mostly these things are said by people with little understanding of history. Actually the Gospels come relatively quickly after the event for writing down of what was probably not that important of events.

Also sometimes I hear super stupid things from the myth camp like 'The Romans kept such good records of the people the crucified.' What? No they didn't. That's just a blatant lie, and we certainly don't have anything close to complete records of who the Romans crucified. So there are reasons that Historians don't take this stuff seriously, not because it's not a serious idea, but because often the arguments used to advance it are not very in line with the historical process and lack a very good understanding of the world at large. People trying to make the case that Jesus didn't exist should spend some time understanding the overall history of the region and drop a lot of the crappy arguments they make.
(Keep in mind I'm not sure whether or not this applies to the video link, as I haven't watched it yet.)