Best reason of alldon ' t want to be . <| sep |> I think you visibly don ' t understand that those two sentences are the same . Btw , tldr <| sep |> Yeah , but the problem is that the Jesus studies departments only get funding from religious groups . So there ' s no inherent push to be at all critical of the lack of evidence and a lot of motivation to just maintain the status quo . I would like a greater degree of resolution on the historicity of Jesus rather than the sorry state of affairs we have presently , just as I would like to see the same for other various historical events of inadequate veracity . Anyway , for clarification ' s sake , here ' s my view on the historical Jesus there was no individual , albeitnotdeified historical Jesus . The idea that there was any individual matching the description of Jesus is silly , the overwhelming textual evidence shows that Jesus is most likely a potpourri of multiple messiah figures Dr . Carrier notes that over sixty such figures existed in Palestine just in the thirtythree year span claimed by Christians combined in the Q document . I ' m willing to allow that the theoretical Q document was , in fact , an actual historical record of the claims of many of these figures . And I ' m even willing to allow that the Gospels are in fact some kind of weird fanfiction of it or an attempt to create a religion using the best pieces of certain messiah figures . However , nothing like this is what mainstream historians claimthey still hold to the irretrievably silly belief that Jesus was one , nondeified guy . But that ' s virtually impossible given what we already know of the area in that time .