Was Jesus a historical man

Answer 1

Yes, of course he was.

The most thorough accounts of his life can be found in the New Testament in the Bible, independently written at different times by Matthew and John (two of his disciples), Mark ( another follower) and Luke who was not a Jew but a Greek doctor and a friend of another follower, Paul. He was commissioned to write an orderly history of Jesus and so he wrote two books - his gospel and Acts (which tells of the last days of Jesus before the Ascension and the early church).

In addition to these, Paul and others wrote letters to churches and to individuals across the Roman Empire, where the life and works of Jesus are described. Many of these are also in the new Testament.

In addition to these, there have been many secular historians who have described Jesus. The most important of these is Josephus, but others like Tacitus, Pliny the younger, and many others also described Jesus.

In addition to these there is a great oral tradition that pervades the early church. Some of the early church leaders did leave writings of these oral traditions passed down from Jesus himself. One example is Irenaeus, who was a pupil of Ploycarp, himself a pupil of John, one of Jesus' closest disciples.

In fact, there is more historical evidence confirming that Jesus was an actual person and confirming his teaching, deeds and life, than there is for the existence of Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare, or Alexander the great - yet no one would ever question that these persons had never existed.

Answer 2

No historian should doubt this today. The reason is that there is simply too much evidence from The Bible. Even further, in order to be consistent, if Jesus' real existence is doubted then the existence of very many ancient personages, for whom there is significantly less evidence, but who no-one doubts existence, would also be wiped out as real people.

Answer 3

We may never really know whether Jesus of Nazareth was a real, historical man. Most scholars accept that people believed to have existed really did live, unless there is credible evidence otherwise. However, some biblical scholars believe that this is an issue that ought to be explored.
Some have noted that, in his epistles, Paul never spoke of Jesus as a man who lived in the recent past, never indicated that he had ever visited any of the holy sites associated with Jesus and never expressed any wish to do so. He sometimes seems to have believed in Jesus as a purely spiritual being. According to his own account, he merely observed that James and Peter "appeared to be pillars of the Church" of Jerusalem, but seemed unaware that they could have been eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus. While explaining the difficulty in winning converts, Paul said, "For the Jews require a sign" (1 Corr 1:22), which according to G. A. Wells (Did Jesus Exist?) means that Paul knew nothing of the existence of any miracles performed by Jesus or any disciples.

Another early Christian work is Hebrews, which once again seems to portray Jesus as a purely spiritual being. In fact, only the Gospels provide actual testimony to the existence of Jesus of Nazareth in the first century CE. There is no contemporary account by the Romans, Greeks or Jews, to attest to his historical existence.

Some of the alternatives are that Christianity began with the worship of a purely spiritual Jesus, but that the gospels portrayed him as a man of the first century, for reasons that may be unclear. Others say that the real Jesus lived 100 BCE (G. R. S. Mead, Did Jesus Live 100 B.C.?). Some see evidence in the Dead Sea Scrolls that the story of Jesus arose from that of a very different Jewish religious leader of either Maccabean times or the first century CE (Robert Eisenman, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the First Christians).