Evidence against: None. I've seen a few quotes from later anti-chrisitian writers that question the alleged miracles. They didn't really seem to question his actual existence in my opinion. I can sort of see how folks might draw that conclusion though. Still, clearly saying, "hey, that Jesus guy didn't even exist." That would be no better than the evidence that he did so at best its a draw.
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The claimed miracles are crucial here.
For almost 2000 years almost everyone on the planet actually believed that miracles really happened. And in particular, almost everyone believed that Jesus had performed all the miracles described in the bible.
It's only really in the last 100 years or so that educated people have understood why modern science has shown that such miracles are probably an impossibility, and that none of those Jesus stories in the bible could have actually happened.
So is that evidence against the reality of Jesus? Well, in a way it is. And it's fairly direct way too. It's very clear evidence that the Jesus stories were invented ... people made them up.
Now, you could still claim that maybe only the miracles themselves were the invention and that perhaps there was still a preacher named Jesus who was the basis of those biblical stories. But you could always make that claim about absolutely every invented fictional story every told ... e.g., maybe Superman was a real person ... maybe every figure from mythology and fiction was actually real, but we just need to cross out all the impossible supernatural bits.
OK, point is - that is not a credible argument or defence to say "lets just cross out all the parts that we have now found to be untrue". It might be a valid argument to do that if it was just one or two wild untrue claims. But in the case of Jesus virtually every account of what he did is centred around a miracle or a miraculous prophetic insight ... and that reduces the entire thing to being so untrustworthy, in fact so clearly now proven to be false, that there is no credible evidence of Jesus left there at all.
But it gets worse. Because in his book "Gospel Fictions" Randel Helms (and I believe various other authors too), have shown that many of the gospel stories of Jesus, especially in g.Mark and g.Mathew (from which other gospels are thought be just elaborated copies), were in fact taken from various prophecies written down centuries before in the Old Testament. The obvious point being that the OT was clearly being used a source from which to invent Jesus stories. So that is actually direct and clear evidence that gospels stories were being fabricated.
You could make the same untenable defence there again, to say that because only maybe 5, 10, 15 or 20 of the gospel accounts of Jesus could be traced to something in OT prophecy, therefore it's possible that the remainder of the Jesus stories were true! But that's the same fallacy as just described above for the miracles. So again – once it has been shown that the OT was being used for more than just 2 or 3 gospel accounts of Jesus, then the entirety of the biblical writing as whole rapidly begins to lose credibility as anything except likely myth.
So that is really quite direct, and again, apparently undeniable evidence that the Jesus stories were never more than invented religious myths that arose from far more ancient OT religious beliefs about people receiving prophecies from God about God's promise of sending a saviour for the Jewish race.
Also, in the letters of Paul (whoever that author was), the writer there says that he got his brief accounts of Jesus and his belief in Jesus, from what he called “scripture”, which is generally taken to mean the OT, but which also probably meant other influential religious writing of the time such as The Ascent of Isaiah. So in those letters, “Paul” repeatedly insists to his readers exactly what Randle Helms showed in his book Gospel Fictions. Namely that the faithful were getting those beliefs and those believed stories from what had been written long before in “Scripture”.
But despite all that, as I have said here at least 100 times in these HJ threads – I am not saying any of that actually “
Proves” Jesus did not exist. Because apart from anything else a literal proof is not possible for any such thing anyway. So all I can say is that whilst he might have existed, the claimed evidence of his existence is actually not credible as genuine evidence at all … there's really no genuine evidence of his existence ever known to anyone at that time … however, we have since discovered (it's taken almost 2000 years!), that there is overwhelming evidence to show that the gospel stories were mythical and probably derived mostly from beliefs in OT “scriptural” prophecies first written hundreds of years before the canonical gospels.
