Evidence for the existence of the historical Jesus Christ?

It seems like all the evidence I've found turned out to be false, but I'm still hearing people saying that he did exist. What evidence are they talking about?

Note: I'm a catholic. Just an FYI.

The disciples?

And how exactly do I trust that information?

Even if the stories are exaggerated its unlikely they made up this person entirely. Its also not just one person writing as multiple different views.

What's your alternative theory, OP? Post it so we can poke holes in it.

That the desiples were guided by God to write but were told to make up the part about Jesus so the people could digest it all easier.

No one gives a fuck about your gay religious affiliation

Not really my theory. Like I said, I'm catholic. I'm just playing devil's advocate.

Some say Jesus didn't exist at all, for there were no records of his existence from the Roman government, and that his story is oddly similar to that of other religious figures, mostly of dead polytheistic religions like the ancient Egyptian religion.

I mentioned it so to give better context, since it's likely that one might assume that I'm an atheist due to the post.

I believe the most prevailing theory is that the definitive version of Jesus was crafted during the councils of early Christendom drawing from the various doomsday prophets and religious leaders that were going around back then. And placed on Yeshua Ben Yosef, I think.
The apostles, John the Baptists and several others are more concrete in their existence, but Jesus is harder to prove since all sources about him were written by the evangelists, of whom only 2 met him (John and Matthew) and it’s disputed wether they actually wrote their respective books.

What if I told you that there are very solid and logical reasons, that certain secret societies are aware of, to think that God incarnates as a specific human being?

...

Jesus was a Communist

>Virtually all modern scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed historically,[g] although the quest for the historical Jesus has produced little agreement on the historical reliability of the Gospels and on how closely the biblical Jesus reflects the historical Jesus.[21][h][i] Jesus was a Galilean Jew[12] who was baptized by John the Baptist and subsequently began his own ministry, preaching his message orally[24] and often being referred to as "rabbi".[25] Jesus debated fellow Jews on how to best follow God, engaged in healings, taught in parables and gathered followers.[26][27] He was arrested and tried by the Jewish authorities,[28] and turned over to the Roman government, and was subsequently crucified on the order of Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect.[26] After his death, his followers believed he rose from the dead, and the community they formed eventually became the Christian Church.[29]

>Virtually all New Testament scholars and Near East historians, applying the standard criteria of historical investigation, find that the historicity of Jesus is effectively certain[4][5][6][7][nb 1][nb 2][nb 3][nb 4] although they differ about the beliefs and teachings of Jesus as well as the accuracy of the details of his life that have been described in the gospels.[nb 5][13][nb 6][15]:168–173 While scholars have criticized Jesus scholarship for religious bias and lack of methodological soundness,[nb 7] with very few exceptions such critics generally do support the historicity of Jesus and reject the Christ myth theory that Jesus never existed.[17][nb 8][19][20][21]

A communist Jew . One of the Bolshevisks

Please leave this board

The best evidence is logic. It is much more reasonable to assume that someone named Jesus did exist and a (largely fanciful) cult developed around his personality than to assume that he didn't exist and people made up Christianity out of whole cloth. As I always point out when asked this question: if Jesus didn't exist, the easiest way for a non-Christian to debunk Christianity in the first century would have been to go to Nazareth and show that no one had ever heard of the man. But no 1st-2nd century non-Christians (specifically Jews) ever argued that Jesus didn't exist; they only argued that he wasn't Messiah.

>It is much more reasonable to assume that someone named Jesus did exist and a (largely fanciful) cult developed around his personality than to assume that he didn't exist and people made up Christianity out of whole cloth.
New to the thread, but I'm not so sure about that. The degree to which Christianity fragmented almost immediately after the supposed death of Jesus doesn't quite chime in with the notion of a cult starting with a single leader who spread the teachings and then gradually drifting apart after he died. "Oh yeah, but Jesus said X" seems to be a pretty good answer to most questions about things about the nature of divinity or whether or not he was even divine that the early Christians split over within living memory and the lifetimes of people who had presumably met and learned from the guy.

> if Jesus didn't exist, the easiest way for a non-Christian to debunk Christianity in the first century
Why would ANYONE bother?

>But no 1st-2nd century non-Christians (specifically Jews) ever argued that Jesus didn't exist; they only argued that he wasn't Messiah.
1st-2nd century Jewish accounts of Christianity as a whole are enormously fragmentary, and what we do have (and let's be honest, that's like 3 lines in the Mishnah) seem to display only the most cursory of understanding of Christian claims in the first place. The idea that Jews were hellbent on stamping out the cult is almost certainly exaggerated if not outright fabricated.

One major point is that four separate gospels and a sizeable Judean cult were unlikely to have spontaneously materialized from just twelve fishermen and a rogue pharissee. Even Mormonism and Scientology needed their Joseph Smith and Ron L. Hubbard. A lack of Roman sources doesn't necessarily mean much when you realize that Jesus wasn't a big deal outside of Judea during his lifetime.

my understanding is that he totally existed and gave sermons
The only thing in question is whether or not he had magic powers

*Twelve low-class randos, rather. I forgot only some of them were fishermen.

How are you a Catholic if you on't believe Jesus was real? What kind of heresy is that?

>The degree to which Christianity fragmented almost immediately after the supposed death of Jesus doesn't quite chime in with the notion of a cult starting with a single leader who spread the teachings and then gradually drifting apart after he died.

For one thing Christianity spread very rapidly, mostly through the efforts of Paul, an outsider to the original 12. Furthermore even the bible hints that these men did not necessarily see eye to eye on theology.

Its quite possible, even likely that most of the early fathers of the faith had slightly different ideas on what it all meant.

In any case the proposal you object to is basically the consensus among professional historians, hardly a group of passionate Christians

>The degree to which Christianity fragmented almost immediately after the supposed death of Jesus doesn't quite chime in with the notion of a cult starting with a single leader who spread the teachings and then gradually drifting apart after he died
Why not? You can easily have several different camps of people who would have different interpretations over what their teacher would have wanted.

Not even every gospel is about death and resurrection. And all of the contradict, some even doctrinally.

>inb4 gnostics don't count