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.
Yes, there probably are real people on which the story is based. No, the stories involving to him are not actually true. c.f.: King Arthur
Jesus’s name was not actually Jesus; it was probably closer to Yeshua. “Jesus” comes to us via transliteration from Aramaic to Greek to Latin.
I am definite that folks with the name yeshua existed around that time. Many jesus’s nowadays to. That im certain. biblical jesus. not so much.