[Calgaryborn]

The argument that there is no proof that Jesus existed is silly. The New Testament has 27 books. Most of these were letters by people who not only claimed to have seen Jesus before His death but also after His resurrection. Paul, Peter, James, Jude, Matthew, Mark, John and Luke all wrote about their experiences with Jesus. Their letters are all written in the common Greek dialect of the time and region. The style of the individual writers can be detected in their letters. The four gospels were obviously written independently of one another as the details of the different events and even the words of Jesus differ slightly with each teller. Just like if four people witnessed an accident you would get different bits of information from each of them and from that get a fuller picture of the events.

The twelve apostles along with at least 500 hundred others lived hard lives and died mostly cruel deaths without ever recanting the reality of both Jesus' life and resurrection. We have writings from contemporaries who testify to this. Compare that to Mormonism : I heard once that 4 of the 12 witnesses to Joseph Smith's golden tablets recanted before their death. At least one was excommunicated for it.

If their is no evidence for a historical Jesus then there is no evidence for a historical Socrates or Josephus or any number of other historical figures. What do you need video tape? It wasn't until the last twenty years or so that some Jews have began to deny the historical existence of Jesus. They of course have denied that He was the Christ all along. This change of tactic allows them to disregard the accounts of His life and how He fulfilled all the prophetic requirements of the Messiah.

Jesus looked like a Jew. It says in the Bible that their was nothing in His appearance that would attract folks to Him. He would have looked like an ordinary Jew without any feature that would have drawn attention to Himself. Jesus also would have had short hair as was the custom of the time. He also would have looked like someone who had worked for a living. He was after all a carpenters step-son who didn't start His short[3.5 years] ministry until He was 30 years old.