I think the strongest historical record that proves that Jesus existed are from official Roman state records.
There is a translated document that proves Pontias Pilat, the governor of Judea, did indeed sentence a man named Jesus to death at a time that coresponds with scripture.
I don’t recall reading that, but It was a common name.
The strongest evidence is all the New Testament writings about Jesus recorded within a few decades of his death.
The delay in recording is short enough so that it’s implausible he didn’t exist, but long enough that memories had become unreliable.
Here is a reasonable starting point for thinking about this:
My guess is that the gospel writers tried to quote Jesus correctly, but they couldn’t because it was all second-hand.
A good point of comparison is Jesus and Martin Luther. I am sure that both lived. But we know Luther’s views for a certainty, and we know how they changed over time. By contrast, the surviving Jesus quotations appear, to me, jumbled, and we have no idea at what part of his career he stated them.
The shroud of Turin was found to be a fake:
It has long been suspected to be a fake, almost since its original “discovery”. Apart from anything else, if a body was wrapped in a shroud, opening up a three dimensional wrapping and spreading it out in 2D would not result in the image in the shroud.
Whether Jesus is a real person is more controversial. One argument points out that there are no contemporary accounts of Jesus outside of religious texts. This is correct. If Jesus was a significant and important person who crucification of such major import to King Herod or Pontius Pilate, one might have found contemporaneous secular accounts. We don’t have that. Unfortunately, absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence.
What one can say, however, is that there were a lot of tales told about Jesus and the ones that made it to the Bible are only some. Others like the Gospel of Mary, Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Judas, etc. were discarded. There are many reasons for this. One of the reasons was that even in the early church they recognized that there a lot of made up stories in circulation. Did they get the selection right? Who knows. However, in general the miraculous and supernatural claims in the Bible are unremarkable for myths of the period and there is no extra Bible evidence to justify giving them any more credence than we do for supernatural claims from any other religion.
Unless such an experiment takes the torture of crucifixion into account, it would not be a valid experiment. There is a world of difference between a body tortured and hung on a cross, and a body that’s simply laid down.
And incidentally, no study or re-creation or experiment “proving” the Shroud to be fake has ever bothered even trying to explain the pollen grains found in it.
As far as I’m concerned, whether or not the Shroud is some kind of fake is utterly irrelevant to the question of whether Jesus existed – but it really annoys me when people who claim to be evidenced-based people so cavalierly ignore evidence that cuts against their arguments.
Uh…
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/arcm.12269
Abstract
This study proposes an alternative interpretation of the pollen grains found on the Christian relic of the Shroud of Turin, the majority of which belong to entomogamous plants. The examination of the images in the literature and the observation of modern pollen under light microscopy and scanning electron microscopy reveal that the most abundant pollen on the relic may be attributed to the genus Helichrysum (Asteraceae family) instead of Gundelia tournefortii. The other most important pollen found belongs to the Cistaceae-Cistus spp.—the Apiaceae—probably Ferula spp.—and the Anacardianceae—the genus Pistacia. These pollen grains could have come from plants used to obtain expensive and valuable substances that would have been the basis for the oils of Helichrysum, ladanum and galbanum, as well as for mastic and terebinth products; this fact has not been considered by previous authors. Ancient historical records give us references that could link the pollen traces to a mixture of balms and ointments employed for preparing the body for funeral and burial.
But in essence, the most logical explanation to me is that it was made in the Middle Ages, it is just that like many of the fake relics of that era, many are likely to come also from the Middle East, during the Middle Ages.
Until a scientific-based study can prove that someone named Jesus of Nazareth was born in Bethlehem, performed substantiated miracles, was crucified by the Romans, was proven dead, came back to life three days later, and finally ascended into the sky… it’s just a great story. Millions of people believe the story, but nevertheless, it’s an unproven account of one person’s life.
In contrast, we know where Gaius Julius Caesar was born, grew up, married, and exactly how and when he died. Scholars wrote a lot about him because he was very important. Nobody doubts he existed. I mention him because certainly Jesus if he existed, would have been as well known and as well documented as anyone else living at that time, if for no other reason than the miracles he routinely performed and for his coming back from the dead and then disappearing into the sky. That’s certainly not something that happens every day. Somebody should have noted it contemporaneously… not everyone in the Middle East was illiterate.
As far as the “Shroud of Turin” being the burial cloth of Jesus goes, it’s been scientifically proven to be a fake, which is not too surprising if you think about it.
The main source is what Caesar wrote about himself, and then what Plutarch and Suetonius wrote at a much further remove in time than the gospels were from the time of Jesus. And this info was filtered through Caesar having been made a God.
Just because advocates write nonsense about someone doesn’t mean they never lived. By that standard, Donald Trump never lived.
And Jesus was far less important, than a Roman emperor, until decades after Jesus died, when other people used stories about his long-ago preaching to start a new religion. It makes perfect sense that there were coins and artwork depicting Caesar but not Jesus.
No there isn’t.
Do you think there was only one person named Yeshua/Jesus/Joshua running around then? That proves nothing unless you say you were there and saw it with your own eyes.
Are you saying Donald Trump never lived? I’ll challenge that.
Far less important! You denigrate the man. He made blind men see, he walked on water, he turned water into wine, he performed other miracles, AND HE ROSE FROM THE DEAD AND DISAPPEARED UP INTO THE SKY. If someone did just one of those things, everyone within 1000 miles would have heard about it, yet there is nothing written about him from the time. Certainly, the Romans would have noted it other than we crucified a guy by that name.
The problem with that logic is the paucity of witnesses to the resurrection (which varies from gospel to gospel). Biblical accounts identify no more than maybe a score of folks who saw him returned from the tomb, and it is not clear to me that all of them actually saw him killed/entombed. The Gospel according to John claims that after the thing in the place, Jesus went on to do a bunch of other fun and amazing stuff after leaving the place, but if hundreds of others saw him doing those other things, it seems very unlikely that they could first-hand connect him with the Golgotha incident much less had seen him killed.
And it is not evident that Jesus was literate, as he never wrote thing one that we know of.
It stretches credulity that someone with Jesus’ unique supernatural powers (let’s call it what it is) could somehow stay under the radar for so long, and why didn’t his devoted followers take him off the cross when nobody was looking? Why didn’t he just free himself using his supernatural powers?
Regarding a lack of credible witnesses at the resurrection, I can’t argue that since I wasn’t there, and according to you, the gospels don’t even agree on what happened, but presumably, many people witnessed his miracles; they weren’t performed in secret. Did nobody bother to write it down? Just another ordinary day? It’s easy to make up stories about someone who lived hundreds of years ago since nobody from that time is around to dispute them.
I never said Jesus was literate, but there were literate people around, and I think if Jesus were a real person, performing real miracles in public, it would have caught someone’s attention… then again, it could just be total BS to start a church and make a ton of money off the ignorant masses. That would also explain the lack of contemporaneous writings.
Yeah, the parchment was accidentally burned or scraped and re-used. We have almost no records from Roman times. We have some writings that happened to be “best sellers” and thus a lot of copies.
In fact, until recently, we had no proof Pontius Pilate was real, some doubted him too. Not a single record of him is known-
Although Pilate is the best-attested governor of Judaea, few sources regarding his rule have survived. Nothing is known about his life before he became governor of Judaea, and nothing is known about the circumstances that led to his appointment to the governorship.[8] Coins that he minted have survived from Pilate’s governorship, as well as a single inscription, the so-called Pilate stone. The Jewish historian Josephus, the philosopher Philo of Alexandria and the Gospel of Luke all mention incidents of tension and violence between the Jewish population and Pilate’s administration.
So until the stone, we had a number of worn problematic coins (which do not mention his name, of course), and two mentions- Josephus and the Gospels.
He is a diehard atheist who has decided the way to prove that Christianity is wrong, is by proving Jesus didn’t exist. 
Yep. Real. Well, likely a skinny Sadat.
Why would they need it? No one was saying Jesus wasn’t a real man until a few centuries ago. And altho Josephus was a decent historian, he was considered an anti-Christian Jew.
First of all there are the Gospels. Put to paper not long after Jesus (66-90AD), and while living people remembered Him. Reject the miracles, sure, but no one doubted the Man, or claimed “Bullshit!”. Of course they are biased but so what everything back then.
In Books 18 and 20 of Antiquities of the Jews , written around AD 93 to 94, Josephus twice refers to the biblical Jesus. The general scholarly view holds that the longer passage, known as the Testimonium Flavianum, most likely consists of an authentic nucleus that was subjected to later Christian interpolation or forgery.[51][52] On the other hand, Josephus scholar Louis H. Feldman states that “few have doubted the genuineness” of the reference found in Antiquities 20, 9, 1 to “the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James”.[53][54][55][56]
Virtually all scholars of antiquity agree that a historical human Jesus existed.[7][16][17] Historian Michael Grant asserts that if conventional standards of historical textual criticism are applied to the New Testament, “we can no more reject Jesus’ existence than we can reject the existence of a mass of pagan personages whose reality as historical figures is never questioned.”[18]
Festus was now dead, and Albinus was but upon the road; so he assembled the sanhedrim of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others, [or, some of his companions]; and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned:…
To me, that is solid. It is about the stoning of James (which Josephus disagreed with), and only side mentions “…the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ,…” Note that “called”. Not “was”, but called.
They likely did, but almost nothing of that period survives. Pontius Pilate was Governor for around 11 years. Not a single document of his has survived. I read somewhere that if all the original Roman documents (not later copies) were brought to together, they might fill a single bookshelf.
Jesus perhaps studied at one of the early Rabbinical schools, and could probably read and write a little. Many people of that age were what we’d call “functionally illiterate”.
The dead sea scrolls survived, and they say nothing about a supernatural being named Jesus. What’s a guy got to do to get a mention?
The writers of the gospels weren’t independent reporters; the gospels were written to tell a particular story… and even they couldn’t all agree on it. Weren’t some gospels tossed aside because they didn’t pass muster?
If you believe in the gospels, then of course Jesus was real. That’s all the proof you need. Show me some other unrefutable “evidence” that Jesus performed miracles, died, and came back to life three days later, other than the gospels.
This assumes that he did any of those things. If there WAS a historical Jesus, he would have been far less important than that, though. He’d have been yet another apocalyptic Jewish preacher- they were a dime a dozen back then. Why would the Romans write about that?
He didn’t become important until a few decades later, when his followers started “making trouble” for the Romans, and indeed we do have records of early Christian communities and their interactions with the Roman state.
Oh yes, no one questioned Jesus’ existence (in writing) during a period when to do so would have gotten you brutally killed by the church, that’s great evidence for the existence of Jesus (as opposed to, say, the power of the church).
As opposed to all the die-hard Christians, dead set on proving the Bible is right?
Sorry, but when I want to know the real history of the Mormon church, I don’t ask a Mormon priest; when I want to know the real history if Microsoft, I don’t ask the company’s head of PR. Rejection of all non-Christian sources will, of course, result in rejecting any sources that doubt the existence of Jesus or his status as divine. People who believe in the divinity of Jesus are the last people we should be asking historical qeustions about the guy.
That is precisely my point. The Romans didn’t write about a historical Jesus because if he existed, he would just be another street preacher, of which there were many around at the time… UNLESS he performed amazing miracles, brought dead people back to life, and was resurrected as the Bible says. That would certainly be worth the Romans writing about. The only “evidence” of this biblical Jesus is the gospels written years after the fact, and they don’t even agree with each other.
I’m not challenging anyone’s beliefs. You can believe anything you want; I’m saying Christianity is based on a story that isn’t factually true. If someone with supernatural powers were walking around and performing miracles in public, died a horrible death on the cross, was placed in a sealed cave, and was found alive three days before ascending into the sky, that would have been noted somewhere by someone when it was happening. Such a thing had never happened before, and as far as we know, it hasn’t happened since.