then that mean 90% of historical figures can’t be proven to have existed

Well for most of those we tend to use independent verification for their existence. And in the case of jesus, we have literally zero Credible examples of independent verification.

We do have textual evidence other than the bible that points to his existence.

Idk why you would need textual evidence besides the Bible to be certain the guy existed. It’s not like these are magical books that sprung from the earth. They have historical reasons for existing and the most likely reason includes the existence of the dude.

I like to picture my Jesus as a desert hippie that people liked and told tall tales of in order to give people living in that harsh environment some hope and meaning.

IIRC, the religion didn’t get anywhere is Palestine after Jesus supposedly died and it wasn’t until decades later that it picked up in and around Greece thanks to Paul, but no one was around that saw any of the events attributed to Jesus - it was all heresay.

I mean the bible is how many pages and how much of it actually takes place during Jesus’s life? And what is the timespan of the small part that does? Like a year? And the 4 gospels that talk about it are all rehashings of the same stories (more or less) and even contradict each other at times.

That’s a story with a lot of gaps and plot holes to base a belief system around - and that doesn’t even include all the baggage and hate that comes along with it.

People nowadays lose their mind and make death threats to the creators of stories that don’t fix or create new plot holes in canon. And we’re supposed to smile, nod, and happily accept one of the worst constructed stories ever just because some old white men that live the opposite way they tell us to live say so?

In terms of literary evidence there is exactly 1 historian who is roughly contemporary and mentions Jesus

Misinformation.

There’s Tacitus’s Annals (year 117), Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews (93-94), Mara bar Serapion’s letter to his son.

Seutonius (Lives of the Twelve Cæsars) and Pliny wrote about the conflict between the Romans and the followers of Christ (or Chrestus) around that era.

The part mentioning Jesus’s crucifixion in Josephus is extremely likely to have been altered if not entirely fabricated.

The idea that the historical figure was known as either ‘Jesus’ or ‘Christ’ is almost 0% given the former is a Greek version of the Aramaic name and the same for the second being the Greek version of Messiah, but that one is even less likely given in the earliest cannonical gospel he only identified that way in secret and there’s no mention of it in the earliest apocrypha.

In many ways, it’s the various differences between the account of a historical Jesus and the various other Messianic figures in Judea that I think lends the most credence to the historicity of an underlying historical Jesus.

One tends to make things up in ways that fit with what one knows, not make up specific inconvenient things out of context with what would have been expected.

There are lots of people now today who claim to be god, claim to be jesus, claim to have magic powers. so it would appear this is just normal human behavior and has been for a very long time. But the main reason people continue to believe these ancient holy books and all the stories in them is literally because they are protected from inquiry. So Jeff down the street claims to be jesus? We can go test him and try to falsify his claims. But some guy 2000 years ago, ya its not possible to check that one out. And That is why they persist, its by design.

I don’t think this answer is really in the spirit of “no stupid questions”.

It doesn’t matter.

I’d say the “Real Historical Jesus” matters at least as much as a Real Historical Julius Caeser or a Real Historical Abraham Lincoln.

I always relate it to Ian Fleming having a schoolchum who’s father’s name was Ernst Stavro Bloefeld.

That’s different in so far as Fleming was simply borrowing a name for a totally independent character. But Fleming was, himself, a Naval Commander and intelligence officer who leveraged his own biography to inform James Bond’s personal traits. What’s more, he borrowed heavily from the reports and anecdotes of other intelligence officials both during and after WW2 to inform the behaviors and attitudes of his side characters in his original novels.

It actually is pretty interesting to talk about “The Real James Bond” from a historical standpoint, because British intelligence services were pivotal in maintaining the imperial and international financial controls necessary to run a globe-spanning empire.

In the same vein, you might be curious to read about “The Real Julius Caeser” after working through the Shakespearean play or “The Real Abraham Lincoln” after getting through the stories where he’s a Vampire Hunter. These biographies inform all sorts of cultural and economic norms of the era. And reading about historical individuals can be both entertaining and illuminating, particularly when you begin to consider how your own world ended up as it is today.

“Why is Christianity a globe-spanning religious movement going back 2000 years?” is a question worth interrogating. And you can’t really interrogate that question without asking who this Jesus guy was or how he got so popular.

Listened through a history of rome podcast and learned an interesting thing where win was basically like a concentrate so you would mix it with water to drink. Aka. water -> wine.

His life is full of details that defy basic biological and physical laws.

Which is perfectly sensible given that he was given the power to perform wonders by god to establish that he is indeed a messenger of god. The entire point of wonders is them defying the otherwise imposed limits of the physical world. Because the only one who can grant this power is the source of the physical limits themselves and that is god.

This is logically consistent under the axiom that god exists. Which is what the scriptures are all about.

You can set the axiom that god does not exist. But as there is no proof of that, it is equally axiomatic. So given that your logic works on an unproven assumption you should not use it to criticize a different logic based on another assumption.

You go that way, I’ll goto Jesus!

a schoolchum whose* father’s name

The difference is that nobody claims that Socrates was a fantastical god being who defied death,

To use a more modern example, pretty much everyone agrees that Grigori Rasputin was a real person who played a crucial role in the court of the last Czar of Russia.

But there are some positively wild and unexplainable stories that have a decent amount of corroborating evidence that they happened. The story about him healing the prince via a phone call sounds like actual magic. However we all know magic isn’t real, there is definitely some kind of logical explanation. But that explanation is lost to time.

So where do historians land on Rasputin? Well, there was definitely a guy called Rasputin. Some of the stories about him are true. Some are probably false or exaggerated. There isn’t even a consensus on what colour the dude’s eyes were. But that doesn’t mean we dispute his existence.

nobody claims that Socrates was a fantastical god being who defied death

Socrates literally claimed that he was a channel for a revelatory holy spirit and that because the spirit would not lead him astray that he was ensured to escape death and have a good afterlife because otherwise it wouldn’t have encouraged him to tell off the proceedings at his trial.

Also, there definitely isn’t any evidence of Joshua in the LBA, or evidence for anything in that book, and a lot of evidence against it.

We have a lot more contemporay primary sources for the existence of Socrates than we have of Jesus (of which the number of contemporary primary sources is 0).

This. There is evidence that a preacher called Jesus existed, was crucified, and was well-regarded enough to start a following that persisted even after his death.

There isn’t, however, strong historical evidence for any of the magical parts of it.

Well, that’s the question if you want to believe in Christianity.

It’s nearly universally accepted that he is a historical figure, though there is little to no evidence of that. The OP is asking why is that the case with so little evidence. They (presumably) aren’t asking for a religious reason, just as an interest in history. If you are Christian and asking this question you are well past the point of no return for your faith

No, OPs question was perfectly fine, because it is necessary to stress the fact that we have not a single contemporary primary source that Jesus existed. So adding extra parameters is pretty pointless, since we cannot convincingly answer whether he actually existed, much less whether he was a religious figure. Scholars have reached a conjectural consensus that a Jesus in some form likely existed, but it is a consendus based on congecture and circumstantial evidence in the form of later secondary sources.

Eminem claimed to be a Rap God though. Praise be onto him.

Praise be Sol Invictus, the real OG Jesus

Chances are he was more like a cult leader it wasn’t until a decade or two after his death that things really got into full swing, so chances are the actual Jesus would be quite surprised by everything “he” did.

But there were a lot of Jewish mystics cropping up at the time so it’s not impossible or even implausible for some one vaguely matching the description to have existed.

You realize that a significant portion of the bible is the collected letters and works that were at the time (that it was assembled) considered credible, right?

There’s a period of around 80 years that’s pretty hard to account for, but unlike the four gospels where there’s little corroborating evidence that tracks back into that 80 year period, the epistolary works are pretty likely to be authentic. They also reference a bunch of other letters that didn’t survive, something that tends to make them more likely authentic than not. And they involve people who were eyewitnesses of a man named Jesus (or Joshua or Yeshua if you prefer) and his younger (step) brothers.

The rest of the statements about him were solidified by 80 years or so after his death, but all the accounts don’t quite line up — which is actually a good argument for them being based on actual events.

So while there may be plenty of room for debate as to how much of the biblical teachings actually originated with a man named Jesus, his actual existence seems more evident than, say, Shakespeare.