Is there? Such as?
Honestly, while I recognize that I am not an historian, I have significant doubts about the existence of Jesus even as an historical non-divine person.
Mark
Just like a court trial you have to assess all the evidence and that includes personal accounts. Sometimes this is the greatest support especially when no one has any direct evidence in the form of videos or pictures which you can present.
If we were to accept the bible itself then suddenly we have one of the most comprehensive written about Jesus. The things written about all the surrounding aspects such as the places, people, artifacts, lifestyles, even small things like the small detail about items used and descriptions of things can be very accurate. Archeological discoveries have verified a lot of this so we have to say that what is written about the surrounding aspects of Jesus for the times He lived in have to be from people who lived in those times.
The way the stories are written doesn't indicate a myth or something made up. Everything that is written about Jesus is written as though there was an historic person named Jesus. There is a lack of evidence for any mystical Jesus or for any other version of Jesus that would have been something to build a myth on. All we have from supporters and critics is written as though they believed there was a historic Jesus. There were different groups around back then. Some such as the Gnostic branches of Christianity would have loved to have made Jesus into the spiritual and mystical God. They would have grabbed any version of of a non historical spiritual version of Jesus and promoted it. But nothing is mentioned and even they are dealing with an historical fleshly man named Jesus.
Similarly, the memory of an earlier, original Christianity which didn't believe in a historical Jesus would have been a killer argument for the many Jewish and pagan critics of Christianity. Jesus Mythicists claim this mythic Jesus Christianity survived well into the second or even third century. We have orthodox Christian responses to critiques by Jews and pagans from that period, by Justin Martyr, Origen, and Minucius Felix. They try to confront and answer the arguments their critics make about Jesus - that he was a fool, a magician, a bastard son of a Roman soldier, a fraud etc - but none of these apologetic works so much as hint that anyone ever claimed he never existed. If a whole branch of Christianity existed that claimed just this, why did it pass totally unnoticed by these critics? Clearly no such earlier "mythic Jesus" proto-Christianity existed - it is a creation of the modern Jesus Mythicist activists to prop up their theory.
The main reason non-Christian scholars accept that there was a Jewish preacher as the point of origin of the Jesus story is that the stories themselves contain elements that only make sense if they were originally about such a preacher, but which the gospel writers themselves found somewhat awkward. As noted above, far from conforming closely to expectations about the coming Messiah, the Jesus story actually shows many signs of being shoehorned into such expectations and not exactly fitting very well.
There are several other elements in the gospels like this. The Gospels of Luke and Matthew go to great lengths to tell stories which "explain" how Jesus came to be born in Bethlehem despite being from Nazareth, since
Micah 5:2 was taken to be a prophecy that the Messiah was to be from Bethlehem. Both gospels, however, tell completely different, totally contradictory and mutually exclusive stories (one is even set ten years after the other) which all but the most conservative Christian scholars acknowledge to be non-historical.
The question then arises: why did they go to this effort? If Jesus existed and
was from Nazareth, this makes sense. Clearly some Jews objected to the claim Jesus was the Messiah on the grounds that he was from the insignificant village of Nazareth in Galilee and not from Bethlehem in Judea -
John 7:41-42 even depicts some Jews making precisely this objection. So it makes sense that Christian traditions would arise that "explain" how a man known to be a Galilean from Nazareth came to be born in Bethlehem and raised in Nazareth - thus the contradictory stories in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew that have this as their end.
If, however, there was no historical Jesus then it is very hard to explain why an insignificant town like Nazareth is in the story at all. If Jesus was a purely mythic figure and the stories of his life evolved out of expectations about the Messiah then he would be from Bethlehem, as was expected as a Messiah. So why is Nazareth, a tiny place of no religious significance, in the story? And why all the effort to get Jesus born in Bethlehem but keep Nazareth in the narrative? The only reasonable explanation is that Nazareth is the historical element in these accounts - it is in the story because that
is where Jesus was from.
A historical Jesus explains the evidence far better than any "mythic" alternative.
An Atheist Historian Examines the Evidence for Jesus (Part 2 of 2) | Strange Notions
So it is the little things like this that make the bible itself more realistic. When you add this to the archeological discoveries and the non biblical support of other historians plus the many people who are claiming to be witnesses and are appealing directly to us that this is the truth you begin to wonder how can this all be made up. Then there are the 2nd generation disciples who were closely associated with the original disciples who also testify the same. You begin to think its a bit to much to start saying this is some sort of elaborate hoax and well orchestrated fraud. This is why most scholars believe that there was a man named Jesus who was a preacher and was crucified by Pontius Pilot. Add to this that there was a big movement around that time especially soon after Jesus was crucified and claimed to have risen from the dead. Many garnered courage and stood for their beliefs and then went of to be martyred themselves. The Christian movement spread fairly quick despite being something the Romans didn't exactly want.
