It is what it is. Legends grow. Like pebbles in the water, people create ripples in history. Those ripples can be backtracked to a fact that something emotionally powerful happened in Jerusalem around Friday, April 3, 33 A.D. and it still resonates in the 21st century.
People can argue divinity all day long, but the ripples created back then have had a far reaching effect on the world. Only a fucking moron believes nothing happened.
there is no serious scholar of antiquity who denies a historical person named Jesus of Nazareth existed.
We simply don't know if anything contemporary was written about Jesus.
Almost no papyrus scrolls from 2000 years ago survived, or were hand copied for future generations of posterity.
There were not journalists, newspapers, or mass media in the first century AD.
It is extraordinary that anything was written
at all in the first century about a peasant teacher from Galilee.
The NT accounts of miracles are undoubtedly embellished. During his life, Jesus was an itinerant peasant with a ministry of a few dozen people in a backwater, rural Roman province.
Not exactly something that was on the Roman radar
Only emperors, kings, and the high artisticracy were thought worth committing to written record on papyrus.
Almost all information was passed around by oral tradition in the Late Bronze Age..
The fact that multiple, intelligent independent sources attest to a historical peasant named Jesus within a few decades of his execution is remarkable in the context of the first century.
It is substantially more compelling evidence than we have for the existence of the founders of Buddhism, Confucianism.
Confucius is not even mentioned in history until hundreds of years after his death, when his teachings passed down orally began to be written down.
The information we have about Sidartha Guatauma was written down hundreds of years after he died.
But the consensus among almost all reputable religious historians is that Confucius and Sidartha Guatauma were real people who at least inspired the writing of the Analects and the Buddhist canon.