There was no Jesus

[thucythucy]

45. One bit of evidence that Jesus did exist

is the lengths the Gospel writers went through to square the person they were writing about with Hebrew prophecies about the Messiah.

One example being the whole "born in Bethlehem because Augustus wanted to tax the world" nonsense.

If the whole character of Jesus was made from whole cloth, why not just say the dude was born in Bethlehem and leave it at that? Why the whole song and dance about his parents having to leave Nazareth and having to find a cowshed in Bethlehem for his birth?

I suspect the reason was that too many people still alive when the oral tradition started--the accounts that were eventually written down--remembered he was called "Jesus of Nazareth" or whatever the Aramaic would have been. And if he was truly "of Nazareth" then he couldn't be the Messiah because that's not what the prophecy said.

So--the whole story about taxation. In an era before newspapers or public archives it would have been easier to fake this story than to convince people that the religious texts they had been taught all their lives didn't say what they said.

One other point: it keeps being said that the Romans kept "voluminous records" and such. This is hardly true. By comparison to our post printing press world Roman record keeping was sketchy at best, and almost entirely utilitarian, meaning accounts of finances, military pay and such. Then too, the vast if not overwhelming majority of Classical records have been lost over time. Even famous manuscripts have disappeared. Aristophanes--who definitely did exist--wrote some forty plays--all famous in their day and the equivalent to our best sellers--but less than a dozen survive. Sappho was famous among her contemporaries and generations afterwards, considered the greatest lyric poet of antiquity. Almost none of her work survives, and most that we do have is in fragments.

To expect then that various contemporary accounts of an obscure and probably illiterate country preacher--one among hundreds--preaching to a predominantly illiterate audience would somehow inevitably survive is hardly credible.

We'll probably never know one way or the other if there was or wasn't an "historical Jesus." But lack of a contemporary account is in no way conclusive evidence that he didn't.