If the absolute best we can even hope to have from a real HJ is a second century telephone game version of what he said...
That's just the nature of history. Historical things that happen to rulers who employ scribes & clerks can get recorded immediately. Historical things that happen first to somebody else, but in which somebody in the literate classes has some interest/investment, can get recorded as soon as the nearest literate officer or governor or whatever can arrange to speak with the closest available witnesses and a scribe/clerk. Historical things that happen to somebody else without the literate classes having much reason to notice or be interested can go years without getting recorded.
Another potentially disappointing example of the same universal principle: the famous "laconic" wit and eager attitude of the Spartans at Thermopylae (literally named after the Greek name for Sparta, Laconis/Laconia). History records that when they were warned that the Persians would launch so many arrows that they'd fill the sky and cover the sun, the Spartan answer was "Good, then we'll get to fight in the shade". History records that when the force that had them overwhelmingly outnumbered told them to lay down their weapons, the Spartan answer was "Come and get them". History records that when they arrived and picked their spot to make their stand, the Spartan king said "This is where we hold them; this is where they die". But history could very well have made those lines up, because no Spartan who was there survived to relay this stuff to a writer or to anybody else who could relay it to a writer. Even though the soldiers were probably all illiterate, the king probably wasn't, you might think, but he died there too; his last opportunity to write or pass on anything so it might get written by somebody else was before he left Sparta. And the oldest writing we have about what happened was from decades later at least, maybe a couple of centuries.
So we don't have solid knowledge of those kinds of details of what happened after the Spartans left Sparta. But that isn't evidence that the whole thing didn't happen. It's just evidence that it primarily happened to people who didn't immediately preserve it.
Jesus was famous throughout the lands, crowds of people formed to hear him.
But the ONE SINGLE claim to have met Jesus...
Those were crowds of peasants. No writing about what they were up to would be expected. Writing is just not something they did. (It required not only skill they didn't have but also resources they had no reason to waste money buying.) If there
were a bunch of written accounts from people claiming to have been one of those peasants whom Jesus was hanging around with, in a place & time when peasants wrote nothing else, then
that would be a clear sign of fakery.
The only ways a wandering preacher would get written about at all are if the word of him got to an author whose goal was to inform people of distant cultural movements that they might not be aware of otherwise, and/or if the crowds around him got big enough to get the attention of the government, and/or if the movement grew by word of mouth enough to have converts sometime down the line who were more educated and invested/interested in finally writing about it. And lo and behold, we do have such texts, in the form of Josephus writing about those wandering preachers over there and the crowds around them and the Roman response (fitting the first two categories) and the New Testament (fitting the third).
The evidence that we do & don't have (nothing first-hand, just reports from when the situation drew the attention of somebody in the literate classes) is exactly what would actually be expected if there were a real historical figure (or two) whom the Jesus idea was based on. The evidence that some people are saying we should have instead would actually
deviate from the most likely results of a real historical Jesus, making the overall combination of available information a
worse fit for a real historical Jesus than what we really have. It would introduce the question "Why do we have this one thing claiming to be from peasants who produced no other writing" to a situation that currently has no such oddity because we don't have exactly what we shouldn't have. It's like when Creationists demand that evolutionists show them a chimera, pretending that's what evolution calls for, when that would in fact
not fit in with evolution at all.
How do you know that when atheists here (or anyone here) post opinions that are sceptical about the evidence claimed for a HJ, they are actually just "fighting North American Christian fundamentalism"? You say that as if to claim that is the only aim & the only reason for people here who try to explain why they are sceptical of the evidence claimed for a HJ.
Yall demonstrate it over & over again with your posts in the thread. People who were actually interested in investigating the facts wouldn't have the MJs' pattern of letting facts they don't like fly by completely unanswered, harping on irrelevancies to distract from facts that might actually matter to the subject, casually & repeatedly getting easily checkable background facts wrong, and claiming that their interlocutors have said what they haven't said & haven't said what they have said. That's how people act when they're guided not by an interest in accuracy but by emotional investment in one side.
