Chris Hallquist debunks the resurrection:
[A]n uncommitted but well-informed observer would conclude that Jesus was probably one of the many apocalyptic prophets of ancient Palestine, and that his life was heavily mythologised in the gospels, which were written well after his death. The ancient books traditionally ascribed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were based on oral traditions that soon became embroidered with fanciful stories which are not even consistent with each other. The first of these books, Mark, did not come into existence until about 70 AD, and the other two synoptic gospels, Matthew and Luke, were largely based on Mark, with input from a lost document referred to by scholars as “Q.” (The gospel of “John” is later still and presents a very different account of Jesus’ life.)
It’s unlikely that the story of Jesus was made up whole—for a start, the very earliest Christian writings (those of St Paul) date from a time still too close to the events….
However, it’s conceivable that the New Testament’s “Jesus” is a composite figure to some extent, since oral traditions based on the lives of more than one of these prophets could have become conflated as the documents came into existence over time.
And yet, from the comments:
I wonder if you are projecting some of our current experience of a highly literate age in which detailed records are kept back into a culture where (outside a very few religious and government officials) almost nobody could read, write or even count very high, and the idea of keeping written records of events was totally alien to most people.
Put it this way: if Jesus had worked in Ancient Athens there would have been dozens of independent accounts of his story and many would have survived to put him in a historical context. The idea that Socrates, for instance, might be a myth is absurd.
But we have almost no contemporary records from Biblical Palestine, and I don’t see that we have any basis for asserting that Jesus was not wholly fictional. Are there not records of other prophets who are claimed to have worked miracles and resurrected? Are these also non-fictional?
My view is that the Jesus story was only one of many; it just happened to appeal to the right people (e.g. Paul) at the right time. If Paul, say, had died on the way to Damascus, the story of Jesus—if it survived at all—would be regarded as an obscure folk legend like the story of Gilgamesh.
I’ve seen Bart Ehrman claiming (no doubt validly) that there’s no dispute among professional theologians that an historical Jesus lived. I don’t know what “secret stash” of evidence they have for that, though, ’cause it seems much more likely to me that they’re just a group of people who will “go that far, but no farther,” in terms of questioning the beliefs which got them into the profession in the first place. (Would someone who was already a skeptic ever go into theology? Not likely. In fact, this is one of the reasons why skeptics’ arguments against religion and spirituality tend to be so unconvincing: While it’s not necessary to know all of the details of any fairy-tale in order to realize that it’s not true, if you’ve never fallen for the false claims yourself you won’t have made the effort to understand them at the same depth as the most intelligent of the believers do. I’m speaking from [New Age] experience, there, and have seen no examples to the contrary, in half a dozen years of reading the best of the skeptical literature. On the contrary.)
But really, just like the contemporary Babaji fairy-tale, it could go either way: There are surely many yogis named “Babaji” in the Himalayas; but just as assuredly, the Babaji of Yogananda’s Autobiography never existed, and never will.