Muchas gracias for this. I was beginning to wonder if ANYONE had pointed this out, as I just haven't seen this point made before, at least not so clearly. The earliest gospel (Mark, IIRC) dates to about 70 AD, or roughly a generation and half after the alleged events of the crucifixion and of course another generation and a half after the alleged birth of Christ. The latest gospel (John) was about 20 years later.

That's a lot of time for people to play "Titanic", deliberately or not.

Aside from all this, does the fabulist, miraculous mythos described in the gospels meet the high bar for being believed? Do the gospel accounts agree on their description of events and on timelines? Do we know who the authors are and what their methodlogy was?

The answer to all three questions is a resounding "no". A document from that era describing a transaction between two merchants over a sack of grain is trivially believable. A document attesting to raising the dead and to catclysmic geological events and voices coming from heaven has a much higher burden of proof. The gospels disagree with each other substantively, not just trivially as so many claim. And the authors are traditional attributions, and three of the gospels have not even an internal claim as to who the author was. The authors were NOT eyewitnesses, and they did not have even the intellectual framework, much less the ability, to approach actual eyewitnesses with something resembling journalistic integrity.

On top of this, despite some wild claims to the contrary, there is literally no credible secular or government documents verifying the events described.

I'm of the personal view that the above is only the tip of the iceberg if you approach these questions in a truly independent way. Most of the "experts" and "scholars" on these topics are financially beholden to theologically-invested patrons, so of COURSE their consensus is that Jesus was probably a real, discrete, historical figure. Even the ones who have atheist leanings like Bart Erhman are traditionalists in this regard. They know how their bread is buttered.