longweekend58 wrote on Apr 13
th, 2014 at 8:04pm:
your scale is your opinion and yours alone. in terms of original manuscripts there are 1000s of gospels in original form while there are literally only a handful of the others.
Is this debate really going to be so lame and so fact-free that you are going to submit a premiership table of your own opinion as something of worth?
I think most of it has been covered over the pages few dozen pages.
Just for the record (as I have previously said) I believe that Jesus' historicity is irrelevant as opposed to the tradition of his existence, which is, of course, beyond reasonable doubt.
His actual historicity is plagued with problems, not the least being that his greatest evangeliser, Paul, says almost nothing of his existence... Not his birth and very, very few details about his life. He, in fact, admits he didn't even know him. The gospel stories were written decades after Jesus' supposed death and, given the gross errors and contradictions in their detail, don't help much either. Josephus, most historians agree, is littered with later interpolations, so is unreliable (although he at least may be reporting that according to the nascent tradition, Jesus existed... But, who knows!).
There is, in the end, weak evidence that Jesus existed... But that is not to say there is no evidence, but there's certainly not strong evidence in the way there is for, say, Plato and Socrates.