Most antiquities scholars think that the New Testament gospels are "mythologized history." In other words, based on the evidence available they think that around the start of the first century a controversial Jewish rabbi named Yeshua ben Yosef gathered a following and his life and teachings provide...
How much of the gospels have to be true for you to be comfortable jesus existed? On one end you’ve got a dude named Jesus (0%) to every non-magical account at 100%.
Even the non-mystical stuff should have left a mark, but it doesn’t seem like it really did.
That’s the thing. Personally I’d need an individual who fits the nonmagical description moderately well and made the majority of the claims he’s said to have made. Namely I need most of his major teachings coming from the same individual. A parable or two here or there is one thing, but the beatitudes, the greatest commandment, turn the other cheek, etc that’s important to the claim that this individual existed. If it was just some dude who got executed named Jesus who wandered around clarifying the Torah that’s not the historical Jesus
I am always struck in the reading by how Jesus basically just sounds like every other two-bit cult leader. Everything is put in very grand terms as though he were greatly respected and doing everything for a captivated public but these could actually be just have been very commonplace interactions.
Like just look at how the Mormons mythologized Joseph Smith. He was literally just a “rock in a hat” grifter and dowser of the type was reasonably common who when his life is placed in appropriate historical context was not really super notable. He just got popular. There are a metric fuckton of cults at any given point who just never make superstar notoriety and die out largely uncommented on even in our news and propriety obsessed modernity. Their internal writings however are always self centered and bombastic. Cults elevate the mundane into hyperbole when you are inside them but from the outside they retain their mundanity. There’s a lot of people who just slip through historical cracks the further back you go because their contemporaries didn’t record things they didn’t think was notable or was just the water they swum in. Hard records generally tend to be beaurcratic and stories evolve dramatically to gain staying power.
We don’t treat “Christ” as the job title it is. It isn’t applied to other people but it could be. We say “Christ-like figure” but they could just be Christs. There are plenty of failed Christs out there. You generally dunno which ones have staying power until past the general limits of a human lifetime.