What totally secular evidence is there? How do I find it on the 'net?
I know you weren't speaking to me, but my 2 cents would be:
I would guess that the issue depends upon what "evidence" means, and what "proof" means, if one is looking for both evidence and proof. Here's one offering:
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-evidence-for-a-historical-Jesus
The point behind the article seems to be that no secular historian or non-Christian critic seems to have claimed that Jesus never existed. His historical reality is assumed even by Jewish anti-Christian sources. Apparently you question this assumption, presumably because you believe that it is only a "mere" assumption...? Yet it strikes me that the most obvious way to counter ancient Christian claims was for ancient critics to simply invoke your own question, i.e., "where's the evidence/proof that your Christ ever existed?" Yet, with the possible exception of some of Celsus' charges, this kind of accusation simply seems not to have occurred to critics of the Jesus movement, which seems to be a very important factor in the search for the historical Jesus.
Moreover, I have a problem with the narrowing of sources to only secular or non/or/anti-Christian material. To reject such material is like rejecting the testimonies - as biased as they might be - of people who knew, worked and traveled with Hitler, on the probability that their testimony would likely be strongly pro-Hitler in its bias. But that understandable doubt ought not to invalidate all of their testimony.
Of course, to date, we don't have any contemporary records of Jesus by Jesus - or by any of his contemporary, immediate disciples. However, the New Testament, although hardly an unbiased source, ought not be rejected rejected as evidence in "the Search", for that particular reason. Paul's testimony, in "the seven authentic Pauline letters", as anti-Pauline historian Robert Eisenman writes, gives us a good window into the times.
Paul was a Christian, but he was the first "Paulinist", and he was at odds with the very people who knew and traveled with the "earthly ministry" Jesus. He said that his private vision of the indwelling risen cosmic Christ superseded both the Judean disciples' experience of the ministry Jesus, as well as their christological interpretation of Jesus' Resurrection.
However, out of this opposition, "Saint" Paul still conveys important historical data about the ministry Jesus and his closest followers. Therefore I would tend to count Paul's hostile testimony as important concerning those things that Paul and the Judeans held in common about the ministry Jesus. In this way, a portion of the NT - Paul's authentic letters which preserve memories of a historical Jesus - can be validly utilized in "the Search", even though they were written by a Christian - or at least, by a Paulinist Christian. It's a matter of comparing and contrasting two radically different sets of NT books - the Gospels and the Pauline letters - and finding that, though they are sharply opposed on some issues, on the issue of a historically existing Jesus, they are agreed. The Mythicists still have not convinced me that Paul's Christ was merely a celestial, mystical Being with no earthly connections whatsoever.
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