I agree.
I was discussing Dejudge's rigid claim that the dating of a manuscript decides the date of narrated events.
Jesus is in similar situation of other "historical" characters from which is not expected to have laid archeological remains. Hillel, the Elder, Solon, Socrates, Buddha, Homer and others. The reasons to believe whether they existed or not are not evidences in the strong sense.
Some evidence can be fairly strong, though, without being strictly archaeological remains. Arcaheology is a very important tool in historians' toolbox, but not the only one.
Another one is, basically, Occam, or rather one of it's sub-cases in the historical method: the historical necessity criterion.
E.g., even if we didn't have ANY plausible biographies of Alexander, one fact among many is that suddenly all the diadochi states appear all the way to flippin' India, and then argue and fight and murder their way around who's the real Slim Shady... err... successor of Alexander. But even without the last part, SOMEONE had to physically lead an army and conquer all that land. People over half a continent don't just go, "meh, let's join a foreign empire, put a foreign general on the throne, and be ruled by a foreign ruling elite" out of nowhere. And certainly not 5 different kingdoms at the same time. So SOMEONE must have effected that change.
It may turn out that he wasn't actually called Alexander, or wasn't a single guy, or whatever, but we still NEED someone real there doing that.
At the polar opposite end of the spectrum, we don't really need Timaeus of Locri from Plato's dialogues to be real. He only appears in one source, and even then in some events that never actually happened (Solon and Socrates weren't even alive at the same time, much less meet regularly to discuss philosophy), and appears to just say whatever the author wants him to say. There is no more reason to need him to be historical than Count Pyotr "Pierre" Kirillovich Bezukhov from War And Peace, or really anyone else who only ever appears in works of fiction and only as a mouthpiece for the author. He might still be real or not, but basically nothing NEEDS him to be.
"Paul" happens to be on the Alexander side of things, i.e., have a historical necessity, because some change was actually effected there. At some point there were no Xians in, say, Corinth, and then there were. We NEED someone to be there at some point and do that. Maybe he wasn't actually called "Paul" and maybe he wasn't exactly like the guy in the epistles, but we still need SOME guy there to start that church.
What dejudge doesn't seem to fully comprehend is that whatever those documents prove or don't prove, it doesn't get rid of that NECESSITY. He might be able to push "Paul" into the second century, at best, but that doesn't remove that necessity. Whether it was in the 1st or the 2nd century, someone is still NEEDED there to explain that change.
