I agree we should be objective, but Richard Carrier who is a cherry-picking mythist and activist is far from objective. He has made up his mind that such people never exited and argues his way backwards from his mythological assumptions, refusing to consider the validity of any historical evidence or witnesses which he justs dismisses as so much BS. It's all just a global conspiracy theory, don't you know?
What difference does it matter if an itinerant peacher Joshua ben Joseph, along with hundreds of others like him, existed anyway? You don't have to deny someone's existence to dismiss their related religious nonsense. Ask yourself why it is so important to Carrier to deny that such people even existed? Heck, similar self-proclaimed prophets even exist today? So what? Who cares? What's the hangup?

Instead, let's be objective.

No doubt there was a Jesus or Joshua who got into trouble for rebel-rousing. There were quite a few Messianic prophets at that time in Israel, mostly due to the Roman occupation and the apocalyptic prophesies of Daniel et al.

The myth of the man is the stumbling point. Remember there are, in the first instance, two Christianities. The teachings of James, Jesus’ brother for the Jews and Pauline Christianity for the rest. From there a myriad of versions arose causing so much confusion that Constantine needed the ideas codified in 325 CE.

The rest, as they say, is history.

The historicity of Jesus of Nazareth is not an extraordinary claim, so it doesn't require extraordinary evidence. Ordinary evidence will do. Most scholars accept as historic the letter Paul wrote in 36 AD to the churches in Galatia. In that letter, he mentions that he met James, the brother of Jesus. It is generally believed that Paul calls James "the brother of Jesus" to distinguish this James from other men named James--not because James is a Christian.

I have severe doubts that Jesus existed but it's absolutely no problem for me if Christianity is based on a real, discrete, historical person.

The fact is that the scholarly / academic consensus (and I'm talking secular historians, not just people in the employ of religious institutions) is that it's more likely than not that a historical Jesus (not the same as the Jesus the gospels describe) probably existed. I think this is wrong, for various reasons, but the fact is neither mythicists nor traditionalists / historicists have much hard evidence and are largely making indirect arguments in support of their position.

One thing is for certain, the miracle-working god-man who walked on water, raised the dead, and reattached body parts, and resurrected his own corpse and flew up to heaven, never existed. That's fabulist myth-building, but it's a separate question from whether some dude named Jesus ben Joseph was the origin of that myth, or whether it was entirely invented.

As to Carrier, he's not well regarded by academia and is a fringe player in that discussion space.

Heard the same a good decade ago, so followed the author who’d been interviewed. Made sense. But really, I’ve never cared. If he ‘were real,’ he’d have been little different than you or I. Though … I suspect he’d have had some personality disorder..

If some person did exist, he was certainly not the miracle working, raised from the dead, god-man he was later made out to be. He was simply one of the many messiah figures who existed at that time...many, I am sure, who were crucified. If he had been completely fabricated, I would think they would have done a better job of it. Working through the gospels, one can see the evolution of beliefs about this person. He started out a man; and, in time, ended up becoming god himself. Details of his life and his message are often in conflict with each other; and supposed fulfilled prophesies are also problematic. This does not make sense with him being a total fabrication. It does make sense if some person, who some thought was the messiah, but did not draw much attention outside of his circle, is at the root of it all; and, over time, was turned into something he was not. In the end it really does not matter. If he existed, he was not the savior of mankind, son of god/god; and if he didn't exist? Well, we get the same result.

I started watching it but got bored very soon. It there a much shorter version, like a minute or two?

Seriously, over an hour (no, not gonna watch it) to go over the writings of chronicolers from the era and also the subsequent forgeries by later scribes?

What I want to know is how a middle eastern guys mom was named Mary and his best buds were named Paul (originally Saul the insane, if memory serves), Matthew, Mark, John, and Luke? With a brother named James, to boot

I haven’t watched this as I don’t have over an hour to spend on something so unimportant. There may well be some records of someone whom we could presume the Jesus mythology grew up around, but he was a man, not a deity or a divinity, so it really doesn’t matter whether he actually existed or not.

The saying goes, every lie has a grain of truth. There may have been a flood [smithsonianmag.com] but not world wide and certainly not caused by some mysterious sky guy. Now take the parting of the sea story. A rapid loss of water creating a land bridge that allowed people to cross where there was only water before. Things that may have happened thousands of years before a few guys came around and wrote a book about tales shared verbally for thousands of years and you get bible stories. As for the whole Jesus thing, every good story needs a hero to save the day.