@ Cappytan, I have to disagree with your basis for believing in Jesus as a person. I don’t believed he ever lived because there is no concrete evidence for his existence but there is evidence for political propaganda in the Roman state to promote a fictional god-man saviour hero with a Jewish name. That he existed is the propagandistic assumption which has powered the Roman Church for nearly seventeen hundred years. A superb book to read which helps get a handle on the events of the first century is A Short History of Christianity by JM Robertson...old... but astonishingly good. (Lots of others have written books of the same title).
Secondly Wikipedia is popular consensus information and not necessarily scholarly, i.e. peer reviewed. Wikipedia is not considered a scholarly source at universities.
@Adjusted, although no handwriting of his remains, we have first hand, primary sources in the case of Socrates, the key elements which make history historical. We have no such record of Jesus. All we have is second hand stories about him written years after the purported events. Even more telling is that we have almost exactly the same stories about the life of the NT god-man attributed to other god-men two thousand years before Jesus was supposed to have existed... Crucially in the argument against a real Jesus is that the “Jesus” story did by no means originate with him. The gospels for example tell their own variants on the older set of myths about the saviour of mankind, close in accord but not quite the same. Myths have to have the right ingredients to replicate but the ‘accent’ often changes.
Josephus’ mention of Jesus had long ago been dismissed by textual scholars in the past as a forged insert into his text... but Christians now, in their desperate need to find Jesus as a real person, have resurrected the matter again in an attempt to make Jesus real.
There are very strong arguments against Josephus having known or heard of a wonder working god-man called Jesus. Josephus wrote for educated Romans, had Jesus existed his readership would have wanted to know about him. If there was such a man as the Biblical Jesus; then Josephus would have recorded reams of information not just a passing mention which would have only whetted the reader’s curiosity. Alas there is no secular documentation of Jesus; I would maintain that he is a fiction in just the same way that his town of Nazareth did not exist in Josephus’ day. Jesus was supposed to have lived in Galilee about half an hour’s walk from where Josephus lived. He was too astute a historian to miss out salient facts. The mention of Jesus simply ‘in passing’, is out of character for Josephus’ writings and for him to record he was “the Messiah” is neither the language of a serious historian nor that of a Jew. The handwritten text which does say this is surely a later Christian forgery.
@Doltologist, thank you for telling us about your condition, I do not have it myself but sympathise. One of the joys of being human is our differences.