Jesus of Nazareth never existed

My opponent claims that nothing was written about Jesus of Nazareth during the time in which he was alive. This is false. "The most trusted accounts of Jesus as a human person emerge from the four canonical Gospels. The reason only these four Gospels in particular remain is that St. Irenaeus considered for mystical reasons only some of the many heretical gospels that existed at the time. Four Gospels became the pillars of orthodox faith. Not only do we not know who wrote them, consider that none of the Gospels existed during the alleged life of Jesus, nor do the unknown authors make the claim to have met a human Jesus. Additionally, none of the original gospel manuscripts exist." Not so. The Gospels are not completely unknown, as there are four men who are largely believed to have been the Gospels: http://en.wikipedia.org... http://en.wikipedia.org... http://en.wikipedia.org... http://en.wikipedia.org... Matthew and John were two of Jesus' twelve Apostles. Mark's role within the Bible is disputed, but his life is known. Luke was the companion of Paul (http://en.wikipedia.org...). In the writing of the Bible, the first-person is used often, implying that the writers were in fact disciples or such others. Notice how, on his Wiki page, it is mentioned countless times about the uncontestable accuracy of Luke's writings. His place in the Bible alone is enough to give it strong verification for its accuracy. Therefore, if Luke writes it down, it is almost most definitely true. Many letters documented in the Bible were also written by people who had witnessed Jesus firsthand. So, there was, in fact, much writing of Jesus of Nazareth by people who knew him, or people who worked with those who knew him. Sure, perhaps the Gospels' texts were first published 30 years after crucifixion. However, this may have been because the Bible took so long to assemble. It involved the documentation of numerous letters, and in Luke's case, it must have taken decades of research. "The historical record is conspicuously lacking any real support for the notion of a historical Jesus: artifacts, dwellings, works of carpentry, self-written manuscripts, all missing. All claims about Jesus ultimately reduce to the writings of others, and there has never been any Roman record of Pontius Pilate executing the fringe radical Jew named Jesus. Devastating to historians, for whom the existence of Jesus Christ is curiously indisputable, there has never been a single piece of contemporary writing ever discovered that mentions Jesus or a related figure. All documents relating to the savior were written at least decades after the alleged life of Jesus. These writings invariably break down into three separate categories: unknown authors, people who had never met an earthly Jesus, or apocryphal, allegorical writings." 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. He just needed to have access to a number of records. In fact, it could have been a radical group of people who decided to seek out and destroy all evidence of Jesus' life in an attempt to forget his existence. Because the Bible was so radically published, they couldn't destroy every copy, but they could have done a pretty good job with government records. To make it to today, a document would have to survive for two entire millennia. However, it only takes about five seconds for a document to burn up in flames. Thus, the "unknown" Gospels are known, and one of them is an amazingly accurate historian, who has almost all of his other work verified. They witnessed Jesus either firsthand or secondhand, and they wrote down their experiences in a reasonable amount of time for all of the work they put into it. Therefore, it is easily within the realm of reason that Jesus of Nazareth did, in fact, historically exist, as long as one keeps a slightly open mind to the possible events of history. Thank you for starting this debate.