Lately I’ve heard people attacking the veracity of the fairy tale book with statements like “Jesus wasn’t real” or it was a psy op operation by the Romans that got out of control. And I hate talking about reddit but it’s basically the atheism mods policy over there that Jesus wasn’t real.
I usually rely on the Wikipedia as my litmus test through life, which shouldn’t work in theory but is great in practice:
Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus
Virtually all scholars agree that a Jewish man called Jesus of Nazareth did exist in Palestine in the 1st century CE. The contrary perspective, that Jesus was mythical, is regarded as a fringe theory.
Edit: My suggestion to any who would like to see my opinion changed (see above quote) is to get on the Wikipedia and work towards changing the page. My upvote goes to Flying Squid for reminding us “does not matter at all because that’s not who Christians worship”
Edit 2: practicality changed to practice
Personally, I think there was indeed a Jesus that the Bible character was loosely based on.
It seems more likely that a bunch of religious myths accumulated around a real rabbi than that they all got made up whole cloth.
The “brother of James” comment from Josephus seems to be real and not added on by pious frauds later. However, as others have pointed out, the name was common back then, as was James. As such, it is definitely plausible that this was another semi-famous Jesus.