this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2025
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In almost the same way that the earth being round is up for debate
Ok, serious mode.
There's actually no mention of Jesus or the things he seemingly has done outside of religious texts. It was already ca. 150 A.D. just hints that doubtfuls should look it up in roman writings.
A roman historian (Gaius Suetonius Tranquillas) mentions records that
but no proof for that either and it's Rome.
Some historians think thus, that the workings of Jesus were just an allegory driven a bit further (Similiar to how Moses is just Gilgamesh/Atrahasis epos series remixed).
There is just about as much historical texts pointing to Jesus as there are to Socrates and Spartacus. Like Jesus, neither of them wrote anything themselves. The writings about Socrates come largely from people he taught. The writings about Spartacus come from two different sources who were doing it over a century after he was dead, and the two have a glaring contradiction in the middle of the story.
This highlights the whole problem with the "Jesus don't real" position. It lacks understanding of how history is pieced together. If you're putting the bar of evidence that high and apply it fairly across all historical sources, you end up deleting a whole lot of history. That is clearly not the intent of the argument, but that's what happens.
It sometimes gets even worse than that by misrepresenting things. For example, "this was an important part of the Roman empire and a center of learning. We should be overflowing with sources". Nope, not at all correct. Judea was a backwater, and it's amazing we have literally any sources at all on a rando peasant preacher like Jesus. He was a nobody who happened to get popular long after his death.
If you think this is all fundie-supporting nonsense, read it again. Fundies don't make arguments like "he was a nobody who happened to get popular later". That's not at all helpful to their position. Same with many of the other arguments involving the historical Jesus. They're not at all complementary to treating the Bible as literal, inerrant truth from beginning to end. The same historians arguing this stuff will also tell you that, in all likelihood, his body was tossed in a big pit with a bunch of other hung criminals, because that's just how the Romans did things.
Of the sparse selection of texts that have survived over 2000 years, there are a number of Roman histories that mention Jewish Messiahs cropping up during this period up to and around the Siege of Masada, which ended the First Jewish-Roman War.
Past that you can play the "if you excluded..." game with Greek philosophers, Roman emperors, Renaissance artists, hell you can do it with US Presidents.
Everyone from Socrates to Barack Obama is "cast into question" when you throw away the evidence you don't like.
The fact that "Christians" as a religious movement appeared at this time, and that we have an abundance of visual art, transcribed texts, and even physical structures dedicated to him just never seems to matter.
This reminds me of the endless debate surrounding whether Shakespeare was a real person. It's flogged to death, because you can casually assert "the evidence was written by liars".
It is not, earth is a oblate spheroid.
Oblate Spheroids are round