A man ahead of his time. source
this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2026
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You can be perfectly skeptical of the miraculous claims about Jesus, but he's ~~about as well attested in history as Alexander the Great~~ almost certainly a Real Guy.
It's more or less impossible to come up with a standard of historical evidence that doesn't allow Jesus "the guy from Nazareth who went around saying the end of the world was at hand" without throwing out... most everyone in history before maybe 200 CE?
(edited to be less exaggerated. I know I heard the comparison somewhere once but it's not accurate.)
I, uhhh… you got some sources for this that aren’t the bible? My spouse the religious studies major is here next to me saying that Jesus as real historical figure is extremely highly contested.
Note 1 (not citation 1 because things have to be confusing) of Wikipedia's Historicity of Jesus article lists ten different quotes of various sources (three of them are Bart Ehrman) reiterating that his existence as a normal guy is widely accepted, here's one of them:
~ Graham Stanton (2002). The Gospels and Jesus (Oxford Bible Series) (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. p. 145.
You are not providing a non-biblical primary source though, which is what they asked for. You are just hiding behind an appeal to authority fallacy.
There are not going to be any primary sources of Jesus or any other average person who lived thousands of years ago.
Do you think it's more likely that early Christian writers fabricated a totally fictional person rather than mythologizing one that people already knew existed?
The year 4068:
"Do you think it's more likely that this Jack Kirby and Stan Lee fabricated a totally fictional person rather than mythologizing one that people already knew existed?
Of course Reed Richards existed, and of course he was the leader of the Fantastic Four.
The stories take place in New York City, which we know was a real place, so therefore the stories must be real.
See how bad that logic is?
Hence the continued, likely irreconcilable, dispute about whether there was a real Jesus
Josephus is like the only dude who maybe kind of mentioned a guy named Jesus.
Christians will literally believe anything that comports with their pre held beliefs.
This is an insane take. There's like 2 or 3 references to him from the 1st century CE written by sources not affiliated with the early Christian/proto-Christian movement, which is enough to conclude he probably existed but not much more.
Yeah, I looked a little more, and I can't remember where I saw that comparison for the first time. I've edited it to be a bit less exaggerated, although I think the overall point - that the evidence for Jesus "guy who got nailed to some planks that one time" is about as strong as what we have for many other historical figures - still stands.
That is a blatant lie, and it shows great ignorance of the facts of the matter and the historical method in general since you chose as an example one of the best documented persons of the period. We have lots of contemporary direct evidence of the existence of Alexander the Great: epigraphy, coinage, archaelogy and transmitted written sources by contemporary authors.
We have no such contemporary evidence for Jesus at all. So no, your argument is nonsense and not how history works. The consensus of the existence of a Jesus is based on secondary evidence, which makes it very likely that he existed, but historians can never certify that with absolute certainty the way that they can with Alexander the Great.
Edit: Oh my, you edited your comment to not read what you claimed when I replied to you. But in your edit you did not ackowledge my reply to you blatantly incorrect claim, you just slightly edited it, to read something else, which is also incorrect.
Wow, you really want to be right about this even though your cause is a lost one, even to the point of being disingenous and lying about your previous comment and not acknowledging that your comment was wrong.
Why you would do such a thing, lying and editing your comment without acknowledging your mistake, is something only you would know the reason for. We know how much your word is worth now.