The thing about the alleged "consensus" is a giant red herring. Not only is there no sign that it's even true, but even if it is, it still wouldn't matter. The relevant question is not which side has more people on it, but which side has presented the better case.
The following is the text from the works of Josephus that describes Jesus and mentions the crucifixion.
It is considered to be a falsification inserted by the early Christians. Obviously a hand written text could be fixed by scribes at any time in the approximately 1500 years the manuscript existed before printing was invented.
Do you object to the idea that it's forged? Or do you read the prepositional phrase at the end of that sentence as connected to the verb "considered" instead of the verb "inserted"? Or do you infer that the sentence after that is intended to be the basis for the idea that it's forged?
There are problems with using it to show that Jesus was a historical person anyway, even if one completely believes that the text is authentic, but I'll get that below. For now, some of the possible meanings that your minimalism could be hiding would call for some explanation of the forgery idea in response, and it's possible that some readers have never seen it spelled out, so:
- The writing style is not the usual for Josephus, not only in the way it heaps religiously adoring praise on its subject but also in its lack of explanation of things that would have been unfamiliar to his Roman audience, for whom he's known for giving detailed explanations of Israelisms in the rest of his writing.
- Elsewhere, he has a section listing several guys who wandered around that area preaching similar preachings, some of whom are even named Jesus... but the Jesus we're looking for is not among them. His paragraph of Josephus is far off somewhere else. If Josephus believed in that particular Jesus, he would have mentioned him there; even if he thought this one was different from the rest, he would have at least said how he's different.
- So, where did it end up instead, if it's not where it belongs, where it would have been if it were real? In the middle of a series of descriptions of other stuff that happened in Roman Palastine/Judea, completely from unrelated to anything about religion or prophets/preachers. (I might be misremembering, but for some reason I'm getting that one of them was a Roman politician sex scandal; most of it had to do with politicians, at least.) In fact, the very next thing after the Jesus paragraph begins "...And then another calamity/scandal/crime happened...". But the Jesus paragraph hadn't mentioned any such thing, so what was the preceding one that the word "another" takes off from? It can only be the last thing that had been mentioned before the Jesus paragraph. There's no way for this placement to make a speck of sense; the whole sequence only really works without the Jesus paragraph in it at all. This isn't just forgery, it's dim-wittedly amateurish forgery.
- Other commentators who quoted Josephus in their own manuscripts, and wrote about Jesus and earlier writings concerning Jesus themselves, and thus would be expected to have something to say about Josephus's mention of Jesus, don't seem to have noticed that paragraph's existence for a few hundred years. Then it finally starts getting quoted & referred to where it would be expected in later Josephus commentaries... almost as if that's when it got added.
As for its content, aside from the forgery issue:
The following text is from Flavius Josephus (c37-100AD)
The Antiquities of the Jews. Book 18.3.3
Now there was about this time, Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works,- a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews, and many of the Gentiles. He was the Christ; and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principle men among us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him, for he appeared to them alive again on the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him; and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.
This does indeed express belief in the Jesus story, including some of the supernatural bits. Unfortunately, it does so in Rome in the year 93 or 94. At that time, he doesn't know the truth any better than anybody else who got the stories 200th-hand like he did. (And would we take any other Jew's belief in Jewish religious stuff as a sign that Jewish religious stuff must be true? No; it's just an example that lots of Jews believed it.) All this tells us is that the stories were being told. It could be entirely authentic and it would still be useless for establishing historicity of Jesus.
From the annals of the Roman historian Tacitus. Annal 15:44
15.44.2. But, despite kindly influence, despite the leader's generous handouts, despite appeasing the gods, the scandal did not subside, rather the blaze came to be believed to be an official act. So, in order to quash the rumour, Nero blamed it on, and applied the cruellest punishments to, those sinners, whom ordinary people call Christians, hating them for their shameful behaviour.
15.44.3. The originator of this name, Christ, was sentenced to torture by Procurator Pontius Pilate, during the reign of Tiberius, but although checked for a moment, the deadly cult erupted again, not just in Judaea, the source of its evil, but even in Rome, where all the sins and scandals of the world gather and are glorified.
This does indeed express belief in some version of Jesus, without the supernatural parts of the story. Unfortunately, it only does even that limited version in the first couple of decades of the second century. At that time, he doesn't know the truth any better than anybody else who got the stories 200th-hand like he did. All this tells us is that the stories were being told.
Pliny the Younger
Pliny was the governor of the Roman province of Bithynia, in present-day Turkey. In about 112 AD, he wrote (in Epistles X.96) to the emperor Trajan, asking for advice on how to deal with the Christians in his province, because he was executing so many of them. Pliny wrote:
'They were in the habit of meeting before dawn on a fixed day. They would recite in alternate verse a hymn to Christ as to a God, and would bind themselves by a solemn oath, not to do any criminal act, but rather that they would not commit any fraud, theft or adultery, nor betray any trust nor refuse to restore a deposit on demand. This done, they would disperse, and then they would meet again later to eat together (but the food was quite ordinary and harmless.)
This doesn't even claim that Jesus was real. It just claims that Christians were. Around the end of the first century & beginning of the second.
What this all adds up to for the historical Jesus is: nothing... actually, less than that, because it even adds one little thing going the other direction: a perfectly realistic alternative explanation for where the idea of Jesus would come from without Biblical Jesus having ever been real. Remember that some of those wandering preachers Josephus mentioned had one thing or another or more in common with Jesus, sometimes including his name. This does even more than just set up the idea of rebellious wandering preachers as a general concept in the background of the common psyche of that place & time, from which an individual fictional character could precipitate with a mix of various real people's details and fictional ones (which would fit the introduction of one of the Gospels, I think Luke, where it even tells you from the start that the author is not a witness but a guy trying to bring together a mess of contradictory stories that were floating around at his time and make a single more coherent explanation out of them). Josephus's vaguely-Jesusy-preacher-cloud also even shows that the name "Jesus" would be the single most likely name to get attached to such a coalescent construct, and gives us clear points of origin for some of the details the assembly would assimilate. And the one guy whose life story seems to fit Gospel-Jesus on the most points along the way (like getting arrested and giving the Romans cryptic non-answers instead of defending himself) was active in the 60s, which, while it's late enough to prove that he can't be "the Biblical Jesus" (along with the different father's name, place of birth, and cause of death), is still easily early enough for those fragments of his story to have been a part of the Jesus-cloud that the Gospels were drawing from. So one of the sources that Christians try to use to show that Jesus was real not only doesn't, but actually even clarifies a simple alternative for us without even trying to.
Whether the "Jesus was real" side has most of the unbiased pros on their side or not, they need to present a sound case for their conclusion. What they give us instead is, at best, only a case for the existence of Christians telling Christian stories and doing Christian rituals. (And the equivalent of that "but there are more of us!" gimmick has turned out the be a lie in the last few cases I've seen it tried on other subjects anyway.)
