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[quote=Anonymous]We have four narrative accounts of Jesus’ life and death, written by different people at different times and in different places, based on numerous sources that no longer survive.  Jesus was not invented by Mark.  He was also known to Matthew, Luke, and John, and to the sources which they used (Q, M, L, and the various sources of John).

All of this was within the first century.

This is not to mention sources from outside the New Testament that know that Jesus was a historical figure – for example, 1 Clement and the documents that make up the Didache.  Or — need I say it? – every other author of the New Testament (there are sixteen NT authors altogether, so twelve who did not write Gospels), none of whom knew any of the Gospels (except for the author of 1, 2, and 3 John who may have known the fourth Gospel).

By my count that’s something like twenty-five authors, not counting the authors of the sources (another six or seven) on which the Gospels were based (and the sources on which the book of Acts was based, which were different again).

If there had been one source of Christian antiquity that mentioned a historical Jesus (e.g., Mark) and everyone else was based on what that source had to say, then possibly you could argue that this person made Jesus up and everyone else simply took the ball and ran with it.

But …

But how can you make a convincing case if we’re talking about thirty or so independent sources that know there was a man Jesus?  These sources are not all living in the same village someplace so they are egging each other on. They didn’t compare notes. They are independent of one another and are scattered throughout the Mediterranean.  They each have heard about the man Jesus from their own sources of information, which heard about him from their own sources of information.

That must mean that there were hundreds of people at the least who were talking about the man Jesus.  One of them was the apostle Paul, who was talking about Jesus by at least the year 32 CE, that is, two years after the date of Jesus’ death.

Paul, as I will point out, actually knew, personally, Jesus’ own brother James and his closest disciples Peter and John.  That’s more or less a death knell for the Mythicist position, as some of them admit.   I’ll get to Paul in a subsequent note.  Here I am simply stressing that the Gospel traditions themselves provide clear evidence that Jesus was being talked about just a few years after his life in Roman Palestine.

Christianity did not make a big impact on Aramaic-speaking Palestine.  The vast majority of Jews in the homeland did not accept Christianity or want anything to do with it.  There were not thousands of storytellers there passing on Christian traditions.  There were some, of course, especially in Jerusalem.

But the fact that these stories based on Aramaic are scattered throughout our sources suggests that they were in circulation relatively early in the tradition.  Most of these are thought to go back to the early decade or two (probably the earliest decade) of transmission.   You cannot argue that Jesus was made up by some Greek-speaking Christian after Paul’s letters, for example.

https://ehrmanblog.org/gospel-evidence-that-jesus-existed/[/quote]

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