Atheist Memes

With the gospels, I don't think there's any debate that it comes from an oral history. As for their influences - ever notice the old testament has 2 overlapping creation stories? People spend their lives analyzing the text through various lenses, there's tons of material on how Jewish oral tradition worked and picking apart the markers of it. The rest of the new testament starts to diverge, there's a pretty stark difference between them and the rest of the books

As for lowering your standards of evidence, I really don't understand your point. There's no pictures of Caesar or George Washington, if they existed today the lack of pictures would be pretty suspect.

Jesus was an artisan and orator from an age when writing was expensive and only available to the nobility, and the vast majority of it was lost to time. It's expected that there's no written records of him during his lifetime - he was just some backwater carpenter whose importance wasn't clear until after his death

Context is everything in history. It's like asking "where is his birth certificate?" when someone is born in a time and place where that wasn't a thing

The time frame matters because Pompeii is a time capsule - human hands couldn't have manipulated the evidence past that date up. That's one generation - there would have been people around who met the guy (or should have).

And yet, neither followers or opposing institutions ever questioned his existence, details of the account of his life line up with historical records

Ultimately, what's more likely: there was a man known as Jesus of Nazareth (even if he took up the name and role in someone else's plan), or there was a conspiracy to fake the existence of a man who was a threat to both the Jewish leadership and Roman rule, and neither of those parties (who had people still alive as the movement became a problem) "what do you mean I had him executed? I never met the guy"

Maybe he died, maybe a stand in died, maybe he faked his death with the help of Roman soldiers and fled to Asia. But someone had to have played the role - otherwise a lot of people would have had to flawlessly keep up a conspiracy, many of which weren't believers

You can spend hours digging into every single detail I've brought up, it's literally the most studied historical subject ever with a ton of secular historical work done in the last century. But the consensus is that he definitely existed, there's just too many corroborating details that line up