The Historicity of Jesus Christ as a real Historical figure is valid and sound.

Thank you for accepting and good luck. In order to tackle the issue at hand, I will first lay out a general summary of my arguments. First, We should attempt to address the bias by which people tend to base their opinions of Jesus on. Second, we must clarify under what means we would determine the historicity of Jesus Christ. Third, we will take a look into the methods of research used to determine this historicity. And last, we will look into respected Scholars and Historians whose opinions coincide with the existence Of Jesus Christ. The first part of my argument is fairly simple and shouldn't need much citation if any. The bias I refer to is taking the stance that because miracles are impossible, or because "I simply don't believe in God" Then this means that Jesus cannot be real because no man can perform said miracles. If we were to go by this logic then we should also discount any other historical persons who have legends or fables told about their lives. King Arthur must not have ever existed because mystical swords and magical stones don't exist. William Wallace must not have been real because people thought he had mystical powers as well or the more modern Idea that the movie Braveheart painted. There are hundreds, if not thousands of stories, legends, and fables told about people who actually existed. It is a very primitive Idea to say that Jesus never existed simply because one cannot also accept the idea of miracles or God being real. Whether or not you believe in these things has nothing to do with whether or not he existed. So how do we determine the historicity of Jesus Christ? Simple. We analyze historical data to determine if Jesus Christ existed as a real historical figure, when and where, approximately, he would have lived, and if any major events in his life can be confirmed as actual historical events. [such as his death by crucifixion]. Do do this we need to compare and contrast non christian source material to christian source material. For example, we could compare Roman Sources, such as Tacitus, and Jewish sources, such as Josephus to Christian sources such as the Synoptic Gospels and the Pauline Letters. I don't have enough characters remaining to sit and do this contrasting and comparing for you, unfortunately. So I am forced to refer to scholarly quotes. In a 2011 review of the state of modern scholarship, New Testament Scholar Bart Ehrman wrote: "He certainly existed, as virtually every competent scholar of antiquity, Christian or non-Christian, agrees" Historian Michael Grant states in his book Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels " that "In recent years, 'no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non historicity of Jesus' or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary." In his book Jesus Now and Then, on page 34, Richard A. Burridge (Dean of King's College London and a professor of Biblical Interpretation) states: "There are those who argue that Jesus is a figment of the Church"s imagination, that there never was a Jesus at all. I have to say that I do not know any respectable critical scholar who says that any more." http://en.wikipedia.org... http://en.wikipedia.org... http://en.wikipedia.org... We will now be taking a look into the methods of research used to determine the historicity of Jesus Christ. A number of approaches to historical analysis and a number of criteria for evaluating the historicity of events emerged as of the 18th century, as a series of "Quests for the historical Jesus" The first quest being almost entirely based on Biblical Criticism. This was supplemented with Form Criticism and Redaction Criticism. Form Criticism looks for patterns in biblical text and tries to find the origin based on these patterns. Redaction Criticism views the author of biblical text as a "redactor" i.e. Someone preparing a report, and attempts to see how the redactor(s) might mold or change the text based on their own perspectives. After this Quest, Multiple Attestation was used as a major additional element up until the 1950s. Multiple Attestation is simple. The higher the number of independent sources that vouch for an event, the higher the amount of confidence in the historical authenticity of the event. Other notable criteria for Research are as follows: "double dissimilarity", "least distinctiveness", and "coherence and consistency". The criterion of "double dissimilarity" views a reported saying or action of Jesus as possibly authentic, if it is dissimilar from both the Judaism of his time and also from the traditions of the early Christianity that immediately followed him. The "least distinctiveness criterion" relies on the assumption that when stories are passed from person to person, the peripheral, least distinct elements may be distorted, but the central element remains unchanged. aaaaannnnnnddd The criterion of "coherence and consistency" states that material can be used only when other material has been identified as authentic to corroborate it. http://www.veritas-ucsb.org... http://www.thetablet.co.uk... http://www.earlychristianwritings.com... As we can see from this. The authenticity of Jesus Christ, as a real historical figure, has been extensively researched, over the years, and found, by the vast majority of modern scholars and historians, to be sound and secure. On page 43 of his book, Jesus Outside the New Testament: An Introduction to the Ancient Evidence, American theologian and educator, Robert E. Van Voorst, states: "biblical scholars and classical historians regard theories of the non-existence of Jesus as effectively refuted" The Gospels and Jesus by Graham Stanton (a widely respected new testament scholar) page 145 states : "Today nearly all historians, whether Christians or not, accept that Jesus existed". http://en.wikipedia.org... http://en.wikipedia.org... The last part of my argument speaks for itself. There is not a single respectable scholar or historian in the world who doesn't accept Jesus as having been a real historical figure. Any attempt to deny this can only be based on a strong, anti christian bias, grounded only in ignorance. Thank you, Con, for your time and I look forward to your first argument/rebuttal. Good luck