Perhaps you don’t think holistically. OR you like to ask for proof for why believe there were 12 disciples. Since nobody from Jesus time is alive now, you think can ignore credible historical evidence and say what you like.
Perhaps you haven’t seriously think about how the church started. The church didn’t just float down from the sky. You said Jesus didn’t exist. So did the church start when a group of disciples started to tell people about an imaginary figure called Jesus, and thousands start to believe without ever seeing Jesus before? Of course it could not be, they must have seen Jesus did miracles when he was alive. Thousands of people could not have imagined it. The whole town or Galilee region could not be lying to Josephus ( the historian) and told him about someone they never see, could they? If you insist they could, then you are lying to yourself.
When many people believed and Christian communities appeared, the Jews religious authorities (Pharisees and Sanhedrians etc) fear that they were losing their control over the people (which they had influenced for past 300 years BC), and they started to instigate authorities against apostles. A few years later, the Roman authorities started to persecute Christians (whether
@Kylie believe it or not). The persecutions got more severe, but the apostles and Christians did not give up.
It would be easy for them to live a lie (with tens of thousands of believers looking to them as leaders) if they were left alone by the authorities. It is easy to live a lie when everything is well, but to stick to the truth during persecution require the deepest truth and conviction. And over the years, persecutions got worse: Finally, except for John, all the 11 and Paul faced capital punishment, they died without giving up. Would they suffer through all these if they had made up fake stories about Jesus resurrection? Jesus came to eat and go fishing with them for many days so they knew they were not hallucinating.
The Scriptures claimed that about 120 other disciples saw Jesus after he was resurrected. The rest of the Jews who believed after Pentecost later didn’t see Him . So what caused them to believe and die for their faith? They believed because they saw Jesus cured the sick, expelled demons and did miracles , as Josephus recorded that many followed Jesus because He did many miracles.
And again I ask: Did the mass told Josephus one big lie about an imaginary magician Jesus? Was everyone in the town and region lying to him? Is that possible? When the apostles proclaimed gospel and set up communities which later became churches, they did many miracles too and spoke in different languages to tell them about salvation, which caused people to believe. Or you going to claim without reason that these people just wanted to believe in an imaginary Jesus desperately – and get beaten or killed doing so? For their belief, they were thrown to lions, burnt by fire, drowned in water, crushed by wooden logs while tied to trees etc. Why would they want to live or die through this if they did not have bullet-proof convictions about the Jesus and the disciples?
It is not easy to discredit Christianity and Jesu existence with clever arguments and faking ignorance. Truth stabds the test of time