Did Jesus exist?

[Mudhammam]

No one?  We're talking about jesus, and whats been presented to me in this thread.  Aren;t we?

Yes, but as everyone knows, we have much more attestation to the life of Jesus - in terms of early records written by multiple, independent sources - than any other citizen, rich or poor, public official, emperor, etc., so... My point was simply that such a ridiculous conclusion follows from your logic, unless you arbitrarily play by different rules when discussing different people.

Is your best inference -also- the criterion of embarrassment?  Your best in that case, is still invalid.  I'm fine with taking historical information from these texts, someone needs to tell me which ones and why, though.  The historical jesus bit has so far been one part fallacious argument and nine parts amateur insults.

That's not history, not even by a lower standard than my own.

That's certainly a good indicator of some possibly historical information, especially when it comes from two, three, even four separate sources. I'm more concerned with looking at the overall scenario - some Greek speaking Jews claim to be followers of a man from Galilee whom was, in their minds, the divinely sent Messiah, and moreover, their brand of religion centers around a kind of denial of the fact that he remained dead because he was, as they all confess, crucified (by the Romans). We can observe the embellishment of details as they began reading the Old Testament in the context of his life, such as his virgin birth or the resurrection or the second coming, despite the fact that they can't hide the identity of his earthly father, or that his actual parents had other children. The anecdote about John the Baptist is another good example of information we can glean via the criterion of embarrassment, but in the end, it's a matter of putting the pieces together to form, as I said, a coherent and realistic picture of events. And given the ones mythicists put forth - comparing the situation to Zeus and Osiris, which only an ignoramus could possibly do - it's understandable that they're insulted and laughed at both in and outside of academia.