Jesus as a historical figure.

Let's start off right away by responding to Pro's points. 1. Alexander the Great I'm not really sure how Pro thinks this is analogous or where he was getting his information about Alexander the Great, because we have CONTEMPORARY evidence to support his existence. - The Babylonian Royal Diary mentions the date of Alexander's death, and calls him by name saying "The king died". - An administrative document from Bactria records Alexander's arrival in Bactria. These contemporary sources record the action and movement of an actual living person, putting him in a different category from Jesus, who has none of that. 2. Josephus Pro's assertion that I must doubt or discredit everything written by Josephus is not only ridiculous, it misses the point. Not only is the authenticity of certain passages that mention Jesus hotly contested, but this is not the writing of a man who knew or even knew of Jesus. How could he? He wasn't even alive at the time. For other historical peoples and events mentioned we have other, contemporary sources of evidence to back him up. This is not the case for Jesus! We still have no contemporary evidence for his existence. Everything Josephus writes about Jesus is at best second hand; hearsay, no matter how many books he wrote. 3. THE BIBLE (It should be noted that in my opening statement I insisted the Bible not be used as a evidence for the existence of Jesus.) Pro's assertion that I "must have never read the Bible" is incorrect. As an evangelical christian I read the bible over many times, and as an ex-christian I have read it many more times over. I'm going to do Pro the favor of explaining WHY exactly we aren't using the bible as a source of evidence in this debate, and then I expect the matter to be settled. - Non contemporary source. Whatever your excuse (and some are plausible and believable) the gospels were still not written until well after the alleged life of Jesus. - Anonymous authors. No one knows who wrote the gospels. We have no good reason to believe that they were contemporaries of Jesus (although the timing makes it certainly possible) or that they were his disciples or even knew of him personally. The authenticity of their testimony is suspect. - Inconsistencies. There are inconsistencies, contradictions and errors in the gospel accounts. The two gospels that mention a genealogy for Jesus record different people, and even a different number of generations between Abraham and David. Other inconsistencies include the time of his death, how many people came to the tomb, the number of them that were or weren't women, and various errors including the "slaughter of innocents", the ordered killing of male babies by Herod. Interestingly enough no one else seems to mention this (and historians in his time were not otherwise kind to him at all, he was kind of a jerk.) Futhermore, the bible describes Jesus being born during the census of Quirinius, who was governor of Syria, in 6 AD. But Jesus was clearly born before the death of Herod, because the bible puts the death of Herod during Mary and Joseph's exile in Egypt when Jesus was young (Herod being the reason for their exodus to begin with). The problem with this is that Herod died in 4 BC. These are clearly contradictory accounts. This is not an exhaustive list of all the things that are wrong with taking the bible at it's word on the life and times of Jesus, but it should suffice to show Pro why it has been discounted as a source of evidence, especially if Pro is then going to contradict his own evidence and proclaim that Jesus was a "simple man", not worth a mention by the scholars and scribes he argued with, or the politicians he pissed off, clearly against the biblical account that he was well known. 4. The Ossuary The authenticity of the inscription (particularly the part that says "brother of Jesus") was deemed fraudulent in 2003 by The Israeli Antiquities Authority, the dealer who publicised the box was found with forgery tools in his home. At BEST Pro can claim the authenticity of this evidence is hotly debated. People's opinions, even historians, are no good without the evidence to back it up. No evidence, the opinions mean nothing. I could just as easily quote historians who aren't sure Jesus existed, but that again would be immaterial. Opinions are not evidence. 5. The other stuff Just so Pro doesn't think I'm ignoring him, Tactis, Pliny the Younger, Phlegon and Origen are all non contemporary sources and the same argument for Josephus extends to them. More so since they are so much more set apart from the time. Much of the "evidence" in this list is merely the mentioning of the existence of christians who worshiped their "christ" character, this is not evidence for the existence of christ. The Talmud wasn't even written until 200 CE, so that's nice. Sources http://infidels.org... http://rationalwiki.org... http://en.wikipedia.org... http://en.wikipedia.org...