Hortensia said:
there's no evidence there actually was a real Jesus,
Mind you, I haven't actually assessed the evidence for Jesus' nonexistence -- but it seems, to my mind, like looking for one particular mammoth in the fossil record.
In his own time, Jesus (if he existed) was a small-town preacher in a landscape thick with small-town preachers and country prophets. He lived in a time when birth and death records were hit-or-miss unless you were upper-class.
Furthermore, little notice of him was taken in his own time, except by his disciples. He simply did not get a second glance from people who were not attracted to his message. (I once read that Pilate, at the end of his life, did not remember executing him.)
And two thousand years of war, fire, flood, bookworms, mold, mildew and clerical forgetfulness have intervened.
I have lived a much more ordinary life than Jesus did: I have started no movements, been accused of no capital crimes, made no extraordinary claims about my relationship with the alleged divine. In two thousand years, I expect there will be no evidence for my existence, either.
gently feral