Lately I’ve heard people attacking the veracity of the fairy tale book with statements like “Jesus wasn’t real” or it was a psy op operation by the Romans that got out of control. And I hate talking about reddit but it’s basically the atheism mods policy over there that Jesus wasn’t real.
I usually rely on the Wikipedia as my litmus test through life, which shouldn’t work in theory but is great in practicality:
Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus
Virtually all scholars agree that a Jewish man called Jesus of Nazareth did exist in Palestine in the 1st century CE. The contrary perspective, that Jesus was mythical, is regarded as a fringe theory.
The general ‘undeniables’ are that a man named Jesus existed, was baptized by John the Baptist, and was crucified. It’s presumably safe to say that he was preaching something that was upsetting to the local Jewish and/or Roman authorities, given his crucifixion. While we’ll obviously never know precisely what he was saying, it is important to remember that the New Testament is a collection of independent documents, and so you can extract some common themes from them. He was clearly a reformer of some kind, something of a hippy, and appears to have emphasized some level of personal humility and charity. It should also be kept in mind that this era was a time of massive religious turmoil in the region, and Jesus was far from being the only radical reformer going around and preaching. He just happened to become very popular after dying.
While he obviously wasn’t a magician and didn’t come back from the dead, I do think there are certainly some themes in his message that are positive, and it’s not a coincidence that you see them echoed in other independent religious traditions. Of course, most Christians don’t live up to those values to any meaningful degree at all, but that’s another matter.