Jesus as a person is very specific. There should be more proof then there is.
From Julius Cäsar (who lived in the same timeperiod btw) does proof exists that he lived.
Julius Caesar was a military and political leader of a whole empire. The contemporaries who discussed him (namely Cicero and Sallust) were themselves influential Roman politicians living at the heart of the empire. Why would you expect some no‐name cult leader in an ancillary province, executed with common robbers in the lowest and most humiliating way possible, whose followers (common folk, fishermen and prostitutes) remained underground for over a hundred years due to persecution from both the Jewish and Roman authorities, to have artifacts and texts of the same level as Caesar, or even an order of magnitude less?
The first step must be to acknowledge that there is nothing about Jesus up until around the years 80~120. That simple FACT is uncontested by everybody, and it is also the only fact uncontested by everybody. That is nothing controversial, yet somehow here everyone that brings it up gets downvoted.
Most of the "evidence" is from the second century onwards and written only by christians. You would need to go a couple of centuries forward to find real third-party references about him. Most historians consider this as proof of existence of a person 100 years earlier, that is also true. But I don't know why christians clench so tightly around historians on this issue, when it is also the opinion of most historians that the accounts about Jesus are not historical, and that most of the events told about him historically never happened.
So, if we are gonna go with historians on this, then:
1) Jesus was a real person.
2) Nothing in the new testament about Jesus can be said to have happened except that he was born, that he was poor, and that he was crucified.
There are people in this thread who seem to.
> But that doesn't mean the opposite; that there is nothing about Jesus doesn't become somehow a proof of his existence.
And nobody has argued otherwise, merely that we have the exact level of proof that we would expect of someone of Jesus’ position in Jesus’ geographic location and time period. In fact, we have non‐Christian sources from around the turn of the century, which is why the consensus of historians is that Jesus lived and was executed in that time period.
> Nothing in the new testament about Jesus can be said to have happened except that he was born, that he was poor, and that he was crucified.
Obviously, at least according to any scientific historic standard. But there are people who would deny even that, and can’t seem to accept the scholarly consensus that the man lived and died at all.
Even Santa Claus, who is fictional, is derived from the historical figure Saint Nicholas (with some obvious differences).