Jesus of Nazareth never existed

"The Gospels are not completely unknown, as there are four men who are largely believed to have been the Gospels." Not only do we not know who wrote the Gospels (they are after all anonymous), none of the Gospels existed during the alleged life of Jesus, nor do these anonymous writers claim to have seen a historical Jesus. In other words, "common belief" does not make historical reality, and the use of the first-person does not prove something is not hearsay. A vast majority of the Gospels are in third-person, which is strange if the authors consider themselves eyewitnesses to Jesus. In any case, in the best-case scenario, the Gospels can only serve as hearsay. At worst, they are fictional or mythological stories. Many biblical historians date the earliest of the Gospels (of Mark) at sometime after 70 A.D. The last Gospel (of John) after 90 A.D., which makes it approximately 40 years of silence after the crucifixion of a Jesus(1). The Church has pointed to the apostles Mark, Luke, Matthew, and John, but scholars know from critical textural research that there simply occurs no evidence that the gospel authors could have been the apostles in the Gospel stories. Granting the assumption that the texts support the notion that the apostles are the authors, note the average life span of humans at that time was approximately 30. Very few reached 70. If the apostles were the same age as the alleged Jesus, and wrote their gospels in old age, that would make St. Mark at least 70 years old and St. John well over 110. Truly a miracle! A detailed look of the Gospels Matthew, Mark, and Luke should reveal Mark as the common element between Matthew and Luke: the main source for both of them. The author of Luke's Gospel admits to being an interpreter and not an eyewitness (Luke 1:1-4). Many scholars think Matthew and Luke were derived from Mark and another hypothetical document(2). Yet again, one encounters questionable methodology and apocryphal sources. John, the last Gospel, consists of lengthy theologies from Jesus, not literal words from a historical Jesus. The Gospel of John disagrees with events described in Mark, Matthew, and Luke. In addition, the anonymous pen of this Gospel wrote it in Greek near the end of the first century. This is according to the Bishop Shelby Spong(3). "Perhaps there was some radical Roman guy who wanted to remove all historical traces of Jesus' life in an attempt to squash Christianity. Actually, he could have been any anti-Jesus radical." This response simply does not hold water, given the enormous response to Jesus described in the Bible. The Gospels mention, numerous times, the vast numbers following Jesus, congregating to hear him. These gatherings grew so large that Luke 12:1 claims an "innumerable multitude of people... trode one upon another." Luke 5:15 claims there grew "a fame abroad of him: and great multitudes came together to hear..." Jesus' persecution drew so much attention that all the chief priests and scribes not only knew about him but helped in his execution (Luke 19:47, 23:13, Matt 21:15-23, 26:3). Thus, either the Bible is exaggerating the situation (and thus wrong, and thus fallible, and thus... you get the point), or this Roman or otherwise anti-Jesus radical must have been an atomic bomb of censorship to destroy all records and all memory of the man. Something must have survived, even if there was an extensive effort to destroy the eyewitness accounts of Jesus' existence. This is despite the fact that this response is relatively weak, insofar as it offers a possible account of what happened. ------------------ (1) = Elaine Pagels, "The Origin of Satan" (2) = Randel McCraw Helms, "Who Wrote the Gospels?" (3) = Bishop Shelby Spong, "Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism"