Jesus of Nazareth is a myth, not a historical person. The Gospels are late religious propaganda, Paul barely mentions an earthly life, and the whole story looks like a composite of earlier savior myths projected onto a fictional founder.

Why people find it persuasive

No contemporary Roman administrative record mentions Jesus directly, the earliest surviving Gospel was written decades after the events it describes, and the Christian movement clearly drew on preexisting messianic and mythic categories, which makes it reasonable to ask whether the central figure was invented rather than merely embellished.

Important distinctions

• • Mythicism (no historical Jesus existed) vs. historical minimalism (a Jesus existed but most miracle claims are legendary)
• • Absence of contemporary Roman bureaucratic records vs. absence of all historical evidence
• • Paul's letters as occasional pastoral documents vs. Paul's letters as attempted full biographies
• • Scholarly consensus among historians vs. fringe positions

Christian response

• • The historical existence of Jesus is essentially uncontested among professional historians and biblical scholars, including secular and Jewish scholars with no theological stake in the matter. Bart Ehrman, an agnostic New Testament scholar and vocal critic of the Gospels' reliability, wrote an entire book, Did Jesus Exist?, specifically to refute mythicism, concluding that the evidence for a historical Jesus is overwhelming by the standards normally applied to ancient history. Mythicism is essentially a fringe position outside professional scholarship, comparable to Holocaust denial in its relationship to mainstream historical consensus, even though the comparison is obviously not about moral equivalence.
• • Independent non-Christian sources corroborate Jesus's existence within decades to a century of his life: the Jewish historian Josephus mentions Jesus twice in the Antiquities, the Roman historian Tacitus in the Annals refers to Christus being executed under Pontius Pilate, and Pliny the Younger's letter to Trajan describes early Christian worship of Christ as a god. These are hostile or neutral sources with no motive to invent a founder for a movement they were not part of and, in Tacitus's and Pliny's cases, viewed with contempt.
• • The claim that Paul barely mentions an earthly Jesus misreads the genre of his letters, which were occasional pastoral correspondence addressing specific church problems, not biographies; Paul still references Jesus's Davidic descent (Romans 1:3), his brother James (Galatians 1:19, corroborated by Josephus), his last supper and betrayal (1 Corinthians 11:23-25), and his crucifixion under earthly rulers (1 Corinthians 2:8). The material Paul does include is precisely what an early creed embedded in his letters, dated by most scholars to within five years of the crucifixion, would be expected to preserve.
• • The alleged 'pagan copycat' parallels used to argue Jesus was assembled from earlier dying-and-rising god myths have been thoroughly critiqued by scholars including Jonathan Z. Smith, a historian of religion with no Christian apologetic agenda, who showed that many claimed parallels (Osiris, Mithras, Attis) are anachronistic, based on later syncretistic sources influenced by Christianity itself, or simply do not match the specific pattern of a historical death by Roman crucifixion followed by bodily resurrection claims within a Jewish monotheistic framework that abhorred dying gods.

Christian counterresponse

This is a fair and more defensible position, but it concedes the actual mythicist thesis (no Jesus existed at all) while shifting the debate to the separate and more substantive question of how much of the Gospel portrait is historically reliable, which is addressed by other arguments about gospel dating, authorship, and the resurrection specifically rather than by mythicism.