Jesus Christ, the person, Did Exist

I don't know if this occurred to you, but the Jews would have had an interest in smearing the image of Jesus even if he didn't truly exist. Simply denying his existence would not be nearly as beneficial as encouraging hatred towards the head figure of a rival faith. I should add also, in regards to your mention of the Talmud, that Jesus being within a religious text that was not under control of the Christians doesn't validate his existence. Imagine I create a faith dedicated towards another messiah-like figure and a rival has his own religion with which mine is somewhat intertwined (to better form an analogy to the mentioned situation), he's going to want to put my faith down to keep his elevated. So it is likely that in the pursuit of his faith's elevation he would include the main figure of mine in his 'holy' texts in a negative view, regardless of whether he believed the figure existed or not. Fast forward a few thousand years and you have the same situation, both faiths have books with 'eyewitness accounts' backing them. Alright let me make one final point here, searching other religions for the existence of Jesus Christ is not valid because this is a secular, historical, debate. From a historical point of view, while some holy texts like the bible may contain some shoddy history it is mixed with a large amount of fantasy and falsehoods, the same can be said of a text written and controlled by any other faith. So to answer the question of "why did the jews attempt to explain away Jesus" tomb if there was no Jesus in the first place?" with "It is simply because Jesus existed" does not logically follow, I do apologize for the inconvenience. Backing up your point of view with the words of a former Catholic Priest, while Catholics and other Christians certainly aren't inherent liars, does have quite an issue with it. Said issue demonstrated by the fact that even if you were able to place the most convincing evidence against their beliefs many Christians will try to find a way around it or simply ignore it. Consider this, if a Christian were to say that the crucifixion of Christ wasn't historical, what sort of Christian would they be? Their logical mind may or may not recognize the lack of evidence for such an event but regardless their religious convictions prevent them from truly acknowledging it, I can speak from personal experience as a former Christian. You of course help to make up for this by supplying the words of "known Atheist" Gerd L"demann, who claims the crucifixion is historically indisputable. Not too bad, though it should also be noted that he seems to believe that all disciples and followers of Jesus experienced 'visions' of him in such a widespread way that jump-started Christianity as we now know it, so don't put it past him to believe in unlikely and unsupported events. I feel I should note that outside of a religious group, the claim by a bishop that there were people healed by Jesus who lived well around another hundred years or more from the time they were healed, among mentions of other miracles, is a purely religious statement and does not qualify in a historical debate. Now that I have addressed your statements (any thing not addressed much will be negated by the arguments to come) I will be arguing what historical evidence, or lack thereof, actually points to. Other than that which you have cited, there was plenty of other writings about the area in which Jesus would have been living. Let's take Philo of Alexandria for example, he wrote quite a bit about early Palestine, even mentioning some others who claimed to be messiah-like figures, but not one mention of Jesus of Nazareth. You'd think that he'd write quite a bit about the fellow too, considering he'd have probably thought him a heretic of sorts. Many other contemporary writers covered the same area, neither do they mention Jesus, or was he not famous enough at the time then? I find it funny that the story of Jesus, having little to no historical backing, is also largely similar (as if sharing a 'template' of sorts) to the savior gods of other religions such as Osiris, Dionysus, Mithra, and Attis. It must be mentioned that other than historians living long after Jesus would have, or religious writers, historians didn't write about the alleged Christ. As I sort of mentioned earlier, you'd think a man of such character and growing influence who wanders throughout the lands would attract the attention of many historical writers in the area, but not a sentence written. I feel I am beginning to make this a bit wordy, so I conclude with the simple fact that the historical existence of Jesus has been unproven simply because sufficient evidence does not exist.