@Leadfoot,
Leadfoot wrote:But I haven’t heard of a single reputable historian who does not believe that the historical Jesus actually existed.
What you have not heard of is no conclusive evidence of anything. Such a claim can only be based on caressing a confirmation bias, and the fallacy of the enumeration of favorable circumstances--which is to say, ignoring any evidence to the contrary, such as the unreliability of the scant and ambiguous texts with which christian-biased authors attempt to establish such a claim.
Carrier, Richard Lane,
On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt. Sheffield Phoenix Press, Sheffield (UK), 2014.
Bart D. Ehrman,
Forged: Writing in the Name of God – Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are. Harper Collins, New York, 2011.
James Douglas Grant Dunn.
The Historical Jesus: Five Views. SPCK Publishing, London, 2010.
Quote:There is far too much verified research into it to credibly claim otherwise.
This is utterly false. There are no contemporary texts which mention your boy Jeebus. The claim, for example, that Tacitus mentions him is entirely inaccurate, and based on a claim that Nero persecuted christians after the great fire at Rome. In
The Lives of the Twelve Caesars by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, an author who clearly despised Nero, he praised him because he did not seek to blame anyone, and promptly set about providing aid and shelter to the victims. Additionally, at the time of the fire, and at the time that Tacitus wrote, not even christians called themselves christians. Eusebius, one of christianity's greatest liars, and the so-called father of church history, never mentions the passage in Tacitus, which had been written two centuries earlier--a notable omission. No one, in fact, mentioned the passage until the late 15th century. It is clearly an interpolation (a passage inserted into a text after the original was written). The passage never mentions your boy Jesus.
The claim that Flavius Josephus mentions Jeebus is equally doubtful. In 1980, Louis Feldman, the contemporary expert on the Hellenistic world and Flavius Josephus in particular (he died less than a year ago), published a survey of historical assessments on the Josephus passage in the previous 150 years.
More than 80% of scholars of the Hellenistic world considered the Josephus passage to be in part or entirely an interpolation. It is noteworthy that Flavius Josephus was a Pharisee--how odd that he would praise someone who is alleged to have vilified all Pharisees.
The correspondence between Pliny and the emperor Trajan is laughably absurd. All that it confirms is that there were people at the time known as christians. Nowhere is your boy Jeebus mentioned in their correspondence.
There are no contemporary accounts of this Yeshua and his strange cult. This is not to be wondered at--why would the Romans pay any attention to a few religiously fanatical members of the great unwashed. Your claim is specious, and, once again, what you do or do not know about the historical literature is proof of nothing. Personally, I think it's about a 50-50 shot. Either there were a pack of smelly, unwashed Jews running around Palestine in that time period, and one of them might have been called Yeshua. Alternatively, the story might be an Essene parable (there are problems with that idea that I won't get into here). Frankly, if you stood on a roof top in Jerusalem two thousand years ago at Passover, and threw a handful of pea gravel into the crowds, you would likely hit a religious fanatic with every tenth stone. The amount of gross historical error in the so-called gospels is just breath-taking.
