OMG, I love it!!!

I have spent a number of years considering this, looking at the diminishingly small amount of evidence and here is what I believe. Jesus existed.

1. He was a nobody, and most humans throughout the history of the world had no special mention, why should he be different.
2. There are two historical contemporary sources that speak of this character.
3. Why go to the effort of making him up?
4. Until Paul, Jesus was never ascribed divinity, he was just a guy with a message.
5. Romans crucified people on an industrial scale and virtually never commented on it.
6. He is exactly opposite what Romans understood to be god. They would never have invented such a well...loser to be their god.
7. People of this nature have always existed, they still do.
8. The messiah thing came later, after his death.
9. He wasn't all that nice. Again neither ancient Jews no the Romans would have invented such an essentially flawed character to be a god.
10. Anthropologists, examining oral histories have been struck by how profoundly accurate they are, so we cannot discount documentation written 40-50 years ago.
    He was not called Jesus, was not blond or blue eyed, Jesus was probably married and may have had children, he was a brave charismatic character who dared speak up to his oppressors. He was disliked by the Jewish authorities and the Romans. His one miracle was he gave people a voice for a short time. He was not god, he was not divine, he did not create miracles but I guaranntee he existed.

That's a pretty good summary of the mythicist position regarding the historicity of Jesus. I am a mythicist myself, rather than a traditionalist. Although the things that sway me the most are only glancingly mentioned in the article. Which, in summary, is that if you read the NT in the order in which it was written, you END, rather than start, with the gospels (excepting Revelation) and you see a very interesting progression from Paul's "heavenly Jesus" to the flesh-and-blood Jesus of the gospels. Why did Paul, writing beginning a scant decade after the alleged events of Jesus' life and ministry, not appeal to the then-living eyewitnesses for validation, and instead used a much weaker and less credible appeal to his own personal subjective experience -- the claim that god spoke to him in a vision concerning the things he was teaching about? In point of fact, Paul had, at best, a fractious and prickly relationship with the original apostles.

Could it be that Paul was the origin of what eventually became known as the gnostic heresy? And that the Jerusalem council's competing orthodoxy eventually overcame Paul's "heresy" by subsuming it and reinterpreting it by putting it after the gospel narrative so it would be understood in the gospel context?

It is of course no problem at all for me if I'm wrong. It's really not very important whether Jesus was an actual historic figure, it's just an interesting question.

Read "Killing Jesus" lots of references but who knows.