Did historical Jesus really exist? The evidence just doesn’t add up.

[thucythucy]

210. There is no proof of the existence of the vast majority of human beings

who have lived and died on this planet.

And by "vast majority" I would estimate, say, 90+%. Doesn't mean they didn't all exist, does it?

Even if you discount the hundreds of millions who lived and died before the invention of writing, whose remains weren't fossilized and who didn't leave handprints on cave walls, you're still left with "no evidence" of the existence of the majority of all the people who have ever lived or died.

This is especially true of societies--such as all those under Roman hegemony in the first century CE--where, again, the vast majority were illiterate.

So, no letters, no journals, no interviews, no texts of any sort. And of the texts that were produced, the majority have been lost over time. Homer, for instance, is said to have produced several dozen epic poems. Only two survive. And BTW--there is also no evidence--of the sort you're looking for--for the existence of Homer.

The fact that Jesus -- by most accounts a peasant/craftsman from a rather obscure part of the empire -- is mentioned at all, by anyone, within the first hundred years after his death is what is remarkable. It seems to me that rather than asking--did this man even exist--a more intriguing question would be why is it, out of the millions of people of the era who lived and died in obscurity, and out of the tens if not hundreds of thousands of criminals executed by the Romans, this one man should be singled out for mention.

As has been stated before, in reference to this argument--"Absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence."