Some of the stories probably had a basis with some magic man of the time, but mostly the stories are BS made up after the fact.

Nope. Apparently all fiction. From what I can gather, there was no census recorded and no one had to travel to their place of birth for this event. There is no historical evidence of his existence except for the four gospels, and they cannot even agree on the facts. There are approximately five hundred versions of this messiah story, with all the same features...going back thousands of years before this particular saviour appears...Krishna, Ra, Cliff Richard, etc.

I believe there was a man, a preacher, that "Jesus" was based on, but the name should be first giveaway. This was an error of Greek translators. As far the belief in Jesus as a savior, who rose from the dead, I believe that idea comes directly from Saul, who had some sort of delusional experience on the road to Damascus, and claimed that Jesus spoke to him after his crucifixion (a common form of death sentence of the time), "why have you forsaken me," etc.. Saul changed his name to Paul and really began pushing the idea of the Messiah and savior Jesus.

Another problem is that the books (bible: A book of books) and letters and sermons, etc., of the "Bible" have been poorly translated, over and over, and mostly from the poorly translated Greek and Roman. There needs to be a scholarly translation of the original Hebrew, Greek and Roman texts, including all of the EXCLUDED works and the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Apocrypha. Until that happens the 17th century King James "Bible" is no more than a paper weight.

The fabulist Jesus mythos of the miracle-working god-man who raised the dead, etc., is clearly nonsense. It is less clear whether there was a single historical indivdual named Jesus or not. It presents no problem for me if there was, but I personally am a mythicist (one who believes that Jesus is an invented character, or at best a composite).

My position is the minority position, although, in fairness, most traditionalists (those who believe Jesus is a discrete historical person) are financed by church-related organizations like seminaries and religiously financed universities.

Just to briefly state my own thinking, I find it instructive to read through the NT in the rough chronological order in which it was authored. If you do that, you read Paul first, and the gospels last (but for the Revelation of John). Read Paul, pretending that the gospel accounts are unknown to you, as they were to the original readers of Paul's epistles. You'll note:

1. Paul is basically a contemporary of Jesus, yet never met him.
2. Paul is a contemporary of people like Peter who supposedly were with him, yet, Paul does not appeal to such persons to validate his thinking about Jesus. Instead, he makes the MUCH WEAKER claim that he was caught up by god in a private heavenly "vision". Odd.
3. Paul goes on mostly about a "celestial Jesus", "seated in the heavenlies" who "appears" to people. In fact the original Greek for "appear" is the same word used for ghosts. Not a physical flesh and blood god man, but an apparition. I'm not saying Paul says NOTHING that couldn't maybe be interpreted as the life of a physical ordinary human, but it's certainly not his emphasis and not unambiguous.
4. You'd think Paul would find it irresistible to appeal to his knowledge of anecdotes of specific events in Jesus' life, but he does not indulge in reminisce. It's like there's no backstory.
5. The backstory, including the birth and precocious childhood, is provided decades later in the gospel accounts.
6. When the canon of NT books is devised, the gospels came first, so that Paul's writing could be understood in terms of gospel-provided presuppositions.

I do not believe that Jesus was a real, historic individual, based on the above. I think Paul is probably the origin of what ultimately became known as the "gnostic heresy", which was "corrected" by the gospel accounts, cleverly subsuming Paul's gnosticism by the simple device of how the NT collection was ordered. I think there were, almost from the start, two major competing orthodoxies, one derived from Paul, one probably from Peter and the Jerusalem Council, the latter eventually conquering gnostic thought sometime in the 3rd to 4th century. The victors got to write history.

To me when you put it all together this is the simplest theory for the development of the Jesus mythos. I think Christianity was an offshoot Jewish sect that Paul hijacked and resold to the non-Jewish world, creating a Problem for the originators, obliging them to meld the two with certain compromises, the main one being a break from Judaism which was probably necessary anyway because the Jewish religious establishment would not have approved of this sect and its rising influence. And Paul's intuition that the Jewish laws were burdensome, proved correct.

The Romans Kept Good Records.

Non-believers doubted the existence of Jesus since the end of the 18th century considering that there are no contemporary Roman records of Jesus' existence. There are mentions of Christ (not Jesus) in several Roman works of history from only decades after the death of Jesus. Authentic letters of the apostle Paul in the New Testament were likely written within a few years of Jesus' death and that Paul likely personally knew James, the brother of Jesus. With that said, Paul who never knew Jesus, wrote his findings from an interview with James and many assumptions were established and the gospel accounts of Jesus' life may be biased and unreliable in many respects. So many independent attestations of Jesus' existence are actually "astounding for an ancient figure of any kind". Many dismissed the idea that the story of Jesus is an invention based on pagan myths of dying-and-rising gods, maintaining that the early Christians were primarily influenced by Jewish ideas, not Greek or Roman ones, and repeatedly insisting that the idea that there was never such a person as Jesus is not seriously considered by historians or experts in the field at all.

Yes, he’s the guy picking strawberries and changing oil, he manages the restaurant and flies the plane.

You are kidding, right?