A bit off-topic, maybe some moderator will delete or move it.
Secular historians certainly tend to be of the opinion that the story of Noah's Ark is purely mythical, but I'm pretty sure that the consensus among secular historians is that Jesus did in fact exist, simply that the miracles attributed to him never happened, and that the resurrection never happened.
Don't make the error to promote religious zealots into the rank of a historian, a kind of scientist, by differing between secular and clerical historians. Either you follow the scientific method, or you don't. And if you don't, you are no scientist. Theology is not history. Theology is sure borrowing information and evidence from history, but its primary focus is the study of religious works and concepts. It is also the other way around, religious literature has often helped discovering historic evidence.
Well, the non-existence of Jesus is something that no Christian can accept without becoming something other than a Christian. You can't very well do away with Jesus Christ and still have the term Christian mean anything.
Exactly. You can't stop believing in this core column of your faith without loosing it. It is possibly a taboo for many Christian researchers, except those who believe that the Bible is not meant to be considered literal, but as metaphor for transporting concepts.
If you're referring to Josephus, he was born in 37 AD, while the Crucifixion is generally dated to around 33 AD. So he was not an eyewitness.
Not Josephus - Josephus works mention Jesus, but doesn't mention any of his disciples or the later apostles. But it is not very likely that Josephus really wrote this (the small paragraph praising Jesus reads like a foreign object in the book, as if it was written into the book by somebody later)
Also, the 33 AD is a revisionist claim, it simply fits into the documented tour of duty of Pilate, but has actually no evidence that it happened. Even Tacitus, a roman author who is attributed with a paragraph about Jesus 60 years later, did not mention it.
Remember the problem: The only evidence of such works we have are copies by Christian clerics, that had been produced 1000 years later. Considering the low standards on book preservation back then, it could be the 50th edition of the original work in such a long time.
AFAIK, Luke is generally said in secular circles to have been written between 80 and 90 AD. This would mean that if the author was 20 at the time of the crucifixion, he would have been between 67 and 77 when he wrote Luke.
Again, don't rely just on confirming evidence - because the date of crucifixion that you use is based on Lukes gospel, so you use circular arguments there.
Furthermore, one of the key factors used by secular historians in dating the Synoptic gospels is that the destruction of the Temple occurred in 70 AD. They assume that accurate prophecies are impossible, and so they place the Synoptic gospels, which contain such a prophecy, after 70 AD. But this is to some degree begging the question.
And still...remember that circular argument problem. The only sources for the crucifixion are the gospels, that all contradict each other about many important events (for example the opinion of Pilate about Jesus and the roles of the Jews). Also, all gospels had been written by people, who use perfect ancient Greek language (the scientific lingua franca back then), and still claim to be eye witnesses. All metaphors and constructs in the earliest forms of the gospel are ancient Greek - it is even possible to tell which region of the Roman Empire back then used such a Ancient Greek language, from comparison with other (secular) writings.
The current state evidence is, that we can't tell that Christianity really spread from Judea. The best available evidence is limited to the point, that it came from inside the Roman Empire, possibly created among Jewish slaves or scholars. Before 70 AD, we have no evidence of any Christianity. That does not mean that it is impossible. It just means that we are blind in that era, because historic records that are beyond reasonable doubt do not mention the "Christian Big Bang". The best evidence we have in favor of Jesus existence is just 1000 years old, and was written as nth copy of an old manuscript 1000 years after the original author lived.
We can't even tell when Jesus really lived, because we made already an arbitrary birth date of Jesus the beginning of our time system. How much accuracy we have left there, is already impossible to be told. Damn, we can't even really believe that Charlemagne existed, despite his realm turned Europe upside down in a positive sense.
We can't even really tell, who Jesus actually was, because all evidence we have is deeply contradicting. Every gospel writes about a different character, with often differing religious views. all that the authors really agree on, is the name of the Jewish king, when Jesus was born (which had been Herodes for the whole initial century of Roman dominance over Judea, they all had the same name, with differing titles). They all agree that Jesus was a virgin birth as miracle, but that could already be revisionism, it has a lot in common with the genetics of god-kings at that time, who had strangely been born by human mothers, but had deities as parents. But then things get strange, confuse and suddenly jump 30 years into the future.
Then they become more contradicting, have more differing viewpoints, until they converge again when Jesus is crucified because of being an Jewish heretic at a time, when Judea was still ruled by a Jewish absolutist monarchy representing the interests of the Roman Empire. The kings and priests didn't rule the country anymore, that was already done by Roman prefects, like Pilate, but still represented the order. The Romans had their rule justified by Jewish puppet rulers until the first Jewish war.
If a real Jesus existed, the gospels are based on stories about him, but not written by people who really knew the real person and witnessed it. Nobody can explain why the son of a carpenter did one day become a Jewish revolutionizer, but it is not impossible, we know better documented examples of humans who had become greater than life persons in the spotlight of history, just by fulfilling their role on top of a wave of people who just waited for somebody to do the first step. Maybe he was the first spark of a Jewish revolution, justifying his actions by the corruption of the Jewish priests, who supported the bigot Romans against their own Jewish brothers.
But we don't know it. There is no evidence of not even this very worldly interpretation of the legend. We can tell that maximal 120 years after his death, Christianity formed behind his legend in different groups that seem to feel inspired by his actions. and still it feels like a Jewish uprising against Roman tyrants, that survived as a religion when the romans became suddenly Christians themselves... pretty much like the ongoing revolutions in Cuba and North Korea.
