Okay, but if Jesus isn't real, why do historians believe he is real if the gospels are made up?
There are two things we need to be careful of: what we mean by "historians" and what we mean by "Jesus."
History is studied based on evidence. There are multiple lines of evidence for someone like Alexander the Great or even Pontius Pilate. For Jesus, there are zero. Jesus never wrote anything. People who supposedly knew him didn't write anything about him. No record keepers - or what we might regard today as journalists - traveled along with him to see what was up with this amazing man who definitely existed.
If a person existed today who could verifiably walk on water, wouldn't journalists and reporters follow that person around trying to get interviews and pictures and record everything they could about what this unique-in-all-of-history person said and did?
The bible says that people came from far and wide to have their illnesses cured. There aren't any records from doctors to indicate anything of the sort occurred. There aren't any records showing chronic leprosy outbreaks suddenly vanishing. We should be able to trace a pathway through the Middle East as he conducted his ministry, a route along which diseases were miraculously eliminated, with unusual levels of health and wellbeing. Even if we can’t find him, we should be able to see the effects of his activities.
Instead, what we have in the bible is stories written decades after by anonymous authors who weren't there, revised, expanded, rewritten and elaborated for 200 years before being canonized. There’s nothing anyone can tell us about Jesus that doesn’t come from the bible.
The only thing we can find in history is people who believed he existed. Even the bible admits this. But this doesn’t get us anywhere. We can also find people in history who believe Slenderman, Paul Bunyan and interstellar aliens existed.
None of the gospels were actually written by anyone named for the books. Believers often claim that they're eyewitness accounts, but we know they're not, and we know that the names given to them are by tradition, not by authorship.
The four canonical gospels were probably written between AD 66 and 110. All four were anonymous (with the modern names added in the 2nd century), almost certainly none were by eyewitnesses, and all are the end-products of long oral and written transmission.
The word “pseudepigrapha“ is a deliberately obscurantist term referring to bible lies. Many of the non-gospel writings, such as the epistles have questionable authorship: a good half of Paul’s epistles are regarded as fraudulent (that is, pseudepigrapha), having been written by other people pretending to be Paul; while other epistles are anonymous, falsely attributed to people who didn’t write them, or ambiguous.
Mark was the first gospel, and wasn't written until at least 30 years after Jesus' death. Believers like to cite writers like Thallos, whose writings were sketchy at best, and Josephus and Tacitus, despite Josephus not even being born until at least four years after Jesus’ supposed death.
Thirty years ago, the Rodney King riots broke out in Los Angeles. Imagine if no record of this event existed until today. Imagine if we relied entirely upon the records of someone born four years after, in 1996, to understand what happened at that time. The problem with citing either Josephus or the gospels themselves is that we know they didn’t get it first-hand. If these writers had sources, we should be getting those sources instead. But we’re not.
We know that the Resurrection story from Mark 16:9 onwards was added on much later by someone else (i.e. it's fraudulent). This isn't even controversial. We also know that Matthew is an attempt to revise and redact Mark and was written even later. In many cases it copies word-for-word what Mark says. Luke is similar. When they're not copying each other verbatim, they're often saying completely contradictory things.
John makes things even worse. The Jesus of John might as well be a completely different person. He's doing different things for different reasons. He isn't the “gentle Jesus, meek and mild” Jesus of Mark, Matthew and Luke, he's bolder and unambiguously divine. Or as one writer put it: "John portrays Jesus as 'a God striding over the face of the earth.'" Just the kind of story you'd write if you were creating propaganda for a new cult.
We know that the nativity story was added at least a hundred years later. We know that the crucifixion story is ahistorical; crucifixions were not carried out that way or for those crimes, and bodies were left up to rot as a warning to others. He would not have been taken down and buried; the Romans would never have cared about Jewish custom. And there are no records of the other men who were supposedly crucified alongside him.
We also know that the depictions of characters such as Pontius Pilate contradict what we know of the real people. And nobody can actually find where Jesus supposedly was or did at any particular time.
We know the Cleansing of the Temple - where Jesus disrupted the moneychangers - is ahistorical. Despite most artwork showing a few dozen people being chased out of a church, the temple itself was multiple times larger than a sports stadium, taking multiple years to finish.
Reconstruction of the temple under Herod began with a massive expansion of the Temple Mount temenos. For example, the Temple Mount complex initially measured 7 hectares (17 acres) in size, but Herod expanded it to 14.4 hectares (36 acres) and so doubled its area.
Because the moneychangers were a necessary part of Jewish worship - pilgrims were expected to bring an animal to sacrifice, but many traveling from afar would need to buy one locally and would only have their own currency - the act itself would have been regarded as an antisemitic scandal, comparable to plastering swastikas all over your local sports stadium, and reverberating throughout the Jewish community. It's written about nowhere in Jewish records. And considering it was supposedly perpetrated by a Jewish man, it’s clear the author had no idea of the significance of these practices.
None of this constitutes "history." It's not just that the gospels are explicitly not historical, it's that the history we do know about doesn't line up with what the bible says.
This is historical Neil Patrick Harris.
This is Harold and Kumar (H&K) Neil Patrick Harris.
Historical NPH is a gay man. H&K NPH is a drugged-out, heterosexual creep. It’s entirely possible that Historical NPH has gone to White Castle at some point in time. Does that make H&K NPH real? No. The existence of Historical NPH goes no way towards making H&K NPH real.
Likewise, even if anyone could find a Historical Yeshua - and nobody can - we can concede the existence of some Jewish apocalypse preacher roaming around the countryside without any anxiety or pain. His existence goes nowhere towards substantiating the claims of the bible.
The Jesus of the bible was specific. He did specific acts, said specific things. Although even the bible itself is contradictory about what those things are. For example, the bible gives two contradictory genealogies leading from Adam - who we know to be fictional anyway - through to Jesus. As mentioned, we know that the Pilate of the bible is a fictional version of real-world Pilate, in the same way as H&K NPH.
Historical fiction is a genre of writing. “Gone With the Wind” is set against the backdrop of the American Civil War and Reconstruction. Didn’t happen. The film Contact depicts then-US President Bill Clinton telling us about alien contact. Didn’t happen.
We know that it’s only recently that writings in the “biography” genre are intended to be historically accurate. Prior to only a couple of hundred years ago, “biography” referred to a class of writings that were intended to be inspirational or to promote admiration for the subject, not tell an unbiased, accurate account of their life. In the case of Xianity, “hagiography” refers to this kind of propaganda intended to inspire people to convert.
The bible not being a historical document is even stated so at times by the authors. Paul openly states that he lies - he becomes like one of whomever he wants to convince. The author of John, in a section literally called “The Purpose of John’s Gospel,” claims to have written it so “that you may believe,” not to state reliably what happened. The author of Luke begins by saying that there are a lot of stories about what went on in those days, and that he’s going to provide the true account. And then proceeds to mostly regurgitate Mark.
The gospels aren’t even written like eyewitness accounts, being consistently in the third-person no matter who is around, including when Jesus is alone by himself, when Jesus is alone with Pilate, or alone with the Devil. Nor are they written like historical record, since they don’t provide the account of where this information came from, who told who, the records the author used to construct this history. They’re all written like fictional narratives. It’s weird believers don’t notice this.
The argument around a historical, real-world counterpart to the character in the bible is nothing but a distraction. Believers propose a divine, magical man, literally the son of a god, but when pressed on it instead try to justify it by the mere existence of some unremarkable Jewish man. It’s what’s called “playing tennis without a net.” When the net is imaginary, every ball you serve, no matter how weak, goes over it.
Any amount of historicity in the bible - and there isn’t as much as most believers think - is irrelevant.
Believers must find their magical, water-walking, water-to-wine-making, demons-in-pigs, fig-tree-cursing, flying-into-the-sky Jesus. The one the bible actually describes.
But first, they should actually try to write down a coherent sequence of events of his life using all the gospels, without leaving anything out. When they figure out that it’s not possible to form a coherent history of Jesus’ life, they should reconsider why they thought any of it was historical in the first place.
Until they can and do, we don’t need to put much thought into storybook characters. Much less worship them.
