The position that's been presented is that it's quite plausible that there was an historical personage who was mythologized by his religious followers and subsequent generations of believers. It is also possible that Jesus was entirely mythical, but this hypothesis is less parsimonious than the historical Jesus hypothesis.
On what basis did anyone decide that it's
"more parsimonious" (you mean “simpler“, and hence more likely) that Jesus was real? How was that decided?
How was that decided when your only actual
evidence mention of him is the bible?
How in the world is it sensible to believe that the bible is reliable or credible factual writing of history?
Here are just some of the problems which render the bible completely unreliable and not remotely credible as a factual source of anything about belief in Jesus -
1. The gospels are from anonymous devotional religious writers who never knew Jesus in any way at all, but instead obtained their Jesus beliefs from still more unknown anonymous religious believers who also did not know Jesus, but who had apparently said that they believed there were legends of other people who had once been disciples of Jesus who would surely have known things about him.
2. Even those anonymous hearsay devotional gospels are known only from Christian devotional copyist writing, which in any relatively complete and readable form, dates from the 4th century and later (mostly from the 6th century onwards).
3. Paul's letters are again written by someone who never knew Jesus at all, but who believed in Jesus (as the author continually says) because of that which
“is written”, “from scripture” and
“according to revelation”. That is a theological belief, not an account from anyone who ever knew a single thing about any living Jesus.
4. Out of 13 letters once all claimed to be written by Paul himself, 6 or 7 are now thought to be written by some other unknown authors. Who actually wrote the
“authentic” 6 or 7 is of course not known.
5 The earliest copy of any letters attributed to Paul is said to be Papyrus P46 which religious scholars usually date at circa.200AD. That’s about 150 years after Paul had died and nearly 200 years after Jesus was thought to have lived.
6. All four of the gospels continually describe Jesus performing numerous miracles, all described in great detail, often even including verbatim accounts of exactly what Jesus and others actually said!! In the first century everyone was certain that such miracles definitely happened, and that they were absolute proof that Jesus was indeed the messiah of God. But now we know the precise opposite to be true and those miracle claims are all false and actually prove that such 1st century religious superstitious writing is simply not credible and not true.
7. The same applies to the letters of Paul, where the very little Paul tells anyone about Jesus is that he was a supernatural figure who rose back to life after being dead for three days, and later proved it by appearing to more than 500 people.
8. The biblical stories of Jesus can frequently be shown to have been copied from what had been written centuries before as prophecy in the Old Testament. And in fact Paul and the gospel authors actually say that those old scriptures were their source for the stories they told of their belief in Jesus as their messiah.
It is not
“more parsimonious to believe Jesus was real” from writing as totally discredited and un-factual as that. It is
“more parsimonious”, and certainly more objectively true, to conclude that such writing is
"proven" untrue devotional religious 1st century superstition which is not reliable or credible in any useful measure at all.
