Well at least you’re more interested in the fact finding than most Christians. You should read Carrier’s book, he basically took on the project of “if we held Bible history to the same standard as every other element of history we evaluate” and he goes through every single piece of firsthand evidence we have going out to 130AD, because he gives 100 years after Jesus’s supposed death in case a kid met Jesus and then lived to be over 100, and he basically outlines that there are like 13 supposed firsthand sources, they basically all have issues, he goes through each Gospel and Paul’s letters, shows how many issues there are with those. He shows how Jews already had an industry for creating stories based on the Torah (this also explains things like the Book of Enoch, it was just Jews writing biblical fan fiction, that’s also why there are so many apocryphal texts, it was basically all just Bible fan fiction). The Jesus story is the same thing - they had already mapped out all the lines in the Old Testament that could be taken as prophetic, and then they just made up a character that fulfilled all the prophecies they already mapped out.
Lastly, Bart Ehrman, eh, there’s a reason he won’t debate Carrier.
Well at least you’re more interested in the fact finding than most Christians. You should read Carrier’s book, he basically took on the project of “if we held Bible history to the same standard as every other element of history we evaluate” and he goes through every single piece of firsthand evidence we have going out to 130AD, because he gives 100 years after Jesus’s supposed death in case a kid met Jesus and then lived to be over 100, and he basically outlines that there are like 13 supposed firsthand sources, they basically all have issues, he goes through each Gospel and Paul’s letters, shows how many issues there are with those. He shows how Jews already had an industry for creating stories based on the Torah (this also explains things like the Book of Enoch, it was just Jews writing biblical fiction, that’s also why there are so many apocryphal texts, it was basically all just Bible fiction). The Jesus story is the same thing - they had already mapped out all the lines in the Old Testament that could be taken as prophetic, and then they just made up a character that fulfilled all the prophecies they already mapped out.
Lastly, Bart Ehrman, eh, there’s a reason he won’t debate Carrier.