I am having trouble finding an accurate answer to what I thought was a simple question:
Do most historians believe that Jesus existed or not?
on Wikipedia (I know not necessarily the most reliable) it says : most historians believe Jesus existed .
then on big think , it says most believe he did.
then i see in other sites , most don’t believe he existed and still another website said historians are split .
well which is it? I’m looking for factual answers . What percentage of historians believe that Jesus really existed ?
can anyone point me in the right direction ?
Look at reference 18 (below), an atheist who denies Jesus existed still admits most historians believe Jesus did exist. When you have a qualified source acknowledging a fact that conflicts with his own bias it is strong evidence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus
Virtually all scholars who have investigated the history of the Christian movement find that the historicity of Jesus is effectively certain,[1][2][3] and standard historical criteria have aided in reconstructing his life.
[4][5]
...
Most scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed.[2][18][19] Historian
Michael Grant asserts that if conventional standards of historical textual criticism are applied to the
New Testament, "we can no more reject Jesus' existence than we can reject the existence of a mass of
pagan personages whose reality as historical figures is never questioned."
[20]
...
1 Stanton, Graham (2002).
The Gospels and Jesus (Oxford Bible Series) (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. p. 145.
ISBN 978-0199246168. Today nearly all historians, whether Christians or not, accept that Jesus existed and that the gospels contain plenty of valuable evidence which has to be weighed and assessed critically. There is general agreement that, with the possible exception of Paul, we know far more about Jesus of Nazareth than about any first or second century Jewish or pagan religious teacher.
2
Bart Ehrman (
a secular agnostic) wrote: "He certainly existed, as virtually every competent scholar of antiquity, Christian or non-Christian, agrees" B. Ehrman, 2011
Forged : writing in the name of God ISBN 978-0-06-207863-6. p. 285
3
Ehrman 2012, pp. 4–5: "
Serious historians of the early Christian movement—all of them—have spent many years preparing to be experts in their field. Just to read the ancient sources requires expertise in a range of ancient languages: Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and often Aramaic, Syriac, and Coptic, not to mention the modern languages of scholarship (for example, German and French). And that is just for starters. Expertise requires years of patiently examining ancient texts and a thorough grounding in the history and culture of Greek and Roman antiquity, the religions of the ancient Mediterranean world, both pagan and Jewish, knowledge of the history of the Christian church and the development of its social life and theology, and, well, lots of other things.
It is striking that virtually everyone who has spent all the years needed to attain these qualifications is convinced that Jesus of Nazareth was a real historical figure."
4 Bock, Darrell; Webb, Robert, eds. (2009).
Key Events in the Life of the Historical Jesus : A Collaborative Exploration of Context and Coherence. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
ISBN 978-3161501449.
5 Blomberg, Craig (2011). "New Testament Studies in North America". In Köstenberger, Andreas J.; Yarbrough, Robert W. (eds.).
Understanding The Times: New Testament Studies in the 21st Century. Crossway. p. 282.
ISBN 978-1-4335-0719-9. The fruit of a decade of work by the IBR Historical Jesus Study Group, Key Events in the Life of the Historical Jesus: A Collaborative Exploration of Context and Coherence [Ed. Darrell L. Bock and Robert L. Webb (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, forthcoming).] takes a dozen core themes or events from Jesus’ life and ministry and details the case for their authenticity via all the standard historical criteria, as well as assessing their significance. The results show significant correlation between what historians can demonstrate and what evangelical theology has classically asserted about the life of Christ.
...
18
Robert M. Price (
a Christian atheist) who denies the existence of Jesus agrees that this perspective runs against the views of the majority of scholars: Robert M. Price "Jesus at the Vanishing Point" in
The Historical Jesus: Five Views edited by James K. Beilby & Paul Rhodes Eddy, 2009 InterVarsity,
ISBN 0830838686 p. 61
19
Jesus Now and Then by Richard A. Burridge and Graham Gould (1 April 2004)
ISBN 0802809774 p. 34
20 Michael Grant (1977), Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels