Lately I’ve heard people attacking the veracity of the fairy tale book with statements like “Jesus wasn’t real” or it was a psy op operation by the Romans that got out of control. And I hate talking about reddit but it’s basically the atheism mods policy over there that Jesus wasn’t real.
I usually rely on the Wikipedia as my litmus test through life, which shouldn’t work in theory but is great in practice:
Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus
Virtually all scholars agree that a Jewish man called Jesus of Nazareth did exist in Palestine in the 1st century CE. The contrary perspective, that Jesus was mythical, is regarded as a fringe theory.
Edit: My suggestion to any who would like to see my opinion changed (see above quote) is to get on the Wikipedia and work towards changing the page. My upvote goes to Flying Squid for reminding us “does not matter at all because that’s not who Christians worship”
Edit 2: practicality changed to practice
It is extremely likely he existed, and some of the best evidence for that are the nuanced ways in which canonical Christianity is trying to cover up a very different tradition and version of events.
You don’t make up a story about how the guy you are resting your church and tradition on was regularly arguing with the founder, nicknamed “hollow rock” by the founder, and then goes and denies him three times right when there were around three different trials - at least one of which “hollow rock” is seen going back into the guarded area where the trial was taking place. And then claiming it’s ok because a rooster crowed.
Or that the founder was teaching in public, but then suddenly in private was explaining those public sayings to your leaders. If there was no founder, why not just have him explain the private parts in the made up public instructions (like in Matthew’s sermon on the mount vs all the private explanations in Matthew 13 for sayings found without those secret explanations in apocrypha)?
The New Testament is effectively battling the specter of an earlier tradition, something that seems far less likely to be the case if there was no historical reality and the texts within are conjuring the whole thing up from scratch.
This is a less often discussed aspect of the evidence because of the influence of belief in the field (there’s a number of apologetics and even non-apologetic scholars tiptoe around calling canonical texts bullshit). But it’s quite compelling against mythicism.
Mystery religions were very popular in the 1st century Greek world and Christianity is essentially a Jewish mystery religion. ‘Mystery’ literally meaning ‘secret knowledge’. The story of Jesus telling a parable and then secretly telling the apostles that there is a hidden meaning is itself a parable with the author of the gospel saying that the entire gospel is filled with hidden meanings to be found.
It’s terrible way to spread a message and inevitably ends with people inventing their own meanings and losing what the authors originally intended to convey.
Not quite.
While it is true that there was a mystery component to one of the Judaism sects (the Essenes), a number of the sayings of Jesus are quite anti-mystery and secrecy, such as “what you hear whispered in the dark shout from the rooftops” or “don’t put the lamp under the bed, put it in the window.”
In fact, the secret explanation in Mark is probably a later layer of interpolation, given the way it jumps away from the public sayings at the shore abruptly and never returns but they are still at the shore when they depart.
You see this elsewhere too, for example in Mark 13 which is largely what’s used to date the work to after 70 CE given the explicit details of the temple falling.
The initial public saying of “of these great buildings not one stone will be left standing” could have been more in line with the sentiments of Heraclitus or Leucretius in that all material things end.
Then they go off in private to explain that this really was about the temple falling, which occurred in 70 CE.
There’s even a version of the “shout from the rooftops” saying found in apocrypha that clearly defines what is whispered as only going in one ear and what is shouted as falling on two ears, which fits with the regular “let those who have ears hear” as being part of public statements.
Which is the case in every saying except the secret explanation in Matthew 13:43, which happens to use the very phrase “Father’s kingdom” found regularly in that particular apocrypha including in its version of the public saying being explained whereas Matthew used “kingdom of heaven” instead (this sort of slip up when copying from elsewhere is discussed extensively in scholarship under the term “editorial fatigue”).
So while you eventually see Christianity turn into a mystery tradition, there’s pretty decent evidence that it is a later development over time and the early movement was particularly anti-mystery (as echoed in Jesus’s self-defense in John 18:20 where he proclaimed “I said nothing in secret”).