Really, all the “evidence” derives from the gospels themselves. But that is of course devotional writing from the faithful themselves. And amongst numerous other problems the gospels do of course repeatedly claim miracles which are now known to be impossible (in first century AD people believed miracles really happened all day every day … but now we know that is complete nonsense)
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I agreed completely with everything you said in your post that I didn't quote, but I quibble a bit with the above. The term,
Gospels, usually refers to the Matthew, Mark, Luke and John books of the New Testament. Probably the most significant evidence for the existence of an HJ are the letters of Paul and secondarily perhaps James which might have been written by a Jewish Christian which provides some evidence for a Jewish tie in to the formation of Christianity.
That is not to say that the letters of Paul or the book of James provides particularly strong evidence for the existence of an HJ, it is just to say that they provide the best evidence available.
Ahh, OK .... when I said that all the evidence derives from the gospels, I really meant that it derives from all of the biblical Christian writing inc. Paul’s letters and the non-canonical religious writing, as well as Mathew, Mark, Luke and John.
Really what I meant to say there, was that where non-Christian sources such as Josephus make any mention of Jesus, it seems that they could only have obtained their brief information from what was then already in circulation from earlier Christian devotional writing such as that of Paul and the earliest gospels or proto-gospels.
IOW, I'm saying that works such as Josephus, Tacitus, Philo, Clement, etc. are not ever a primary source of eye-witness commentary on either Jesus himself or on any person who is reliably known to have met Jesus. Those sources are simply presenting hearsay accounts of what was being said by Christian believers at that time.
In which case, the entire story of Jesus is really coming from the earliest Christian religious writers themselves.
But of course the problem with that is - none of those early Christian writers (eg Paul or Mathew, Mark, Luke, John etc.) had ever met Jesus. They were not actually describing their own personal experience of Jesus. They were describing their religious beliefs about a messiah who by that time was traditionally thought to have lived and died at some unspecified time in the past.
However, I don't think it's possible to ignore either the fact that most if not all of what was claimed for Jesus, is in fact a repetition of what had already appeared over 500 years before as variations and interpretations of various prophecies in the Jewish OT. That cannot be mere coincidence.
And further - although the community in that region who produced the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) wrote almost entirely in code with names such as Teacher of Righteousness and Seekers of Smooth Things etc., what is clear from a vast body of religious writing in the DSS, is that their religious beliefs and practices were very similar to the earliest forms of Christian preaching such as that attributed to Paul.
And in particular, what the DSS show is that people were deliberately mixing actual real events with interpretations of their rapturous religious dreams. So that what was presented as real and quite detailed stories of messianic figures like Jesus, could quite easily be derived not from genuinely real events, but merely from dreams ... dreams which at that time were thought to be even more real than reality itself.
The point being – (a) the entire Jesus story appears to derive only from the Christian writing itself, with no independent non-Christian corroboration. And (b) as far as Paul’s visions of Jesus are concerned, and as far as the proto-Christian origins of messianic belief within the DSS community are concerned, what was presented as detailed factual accounts of miracles etc., appears to have been wide open to being nothing more than an interpretation of religious dreams.
