That's not really a good comparison at all. There is not actually any direct evidence for King Arthur at all, even if it's possible he's somehow extremely loosely based on a figure that might have existed somewhere at some point. There is literally nothing we can say about a historical King Arthur. And Robin Hood has always been a purely folkloric figure, never even claimed to be a real historical person.

Compared to Arthur, we know far more about Jesus from far more sources - where he lived, when and how he died, who killed him, a few specific events from his life (baptism by John being the strongest one). We know about him from Jewish, early Christian, and Roman sources. We can guess within a decade where he was born. We know the name of his brother and the role he played in running the religious movement that formed after Jesus died! We have sources from only a decade or two after his death that discuss people who knew him personally.

Yes, the gospel stories are either obviously legendary or at least impossible to verify with the sources we have available. They were written after the religion was establishing a doctrine and they're full of contradictions with each other and with the non-canonical gospels as the followers of Jesus competed to define who he was and what he did. They probably do contain some genuine historical truths - specific actions, sayings, or miracles performed (magicians were a big deal in Judaism at this time). There's probably no way for us to separate out the real from the fictional, but that is not the same as saying it's all fictional.

[+] BodyBySisyphus@hexbear.net 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] jack@hexbear.net 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Not with any degree of specificity, it's not like they had his address in an antiquarian phone book.

Obviously. If they didn't live in a palace, who's address do we know? Preposterous and irrelevant.

We can assume that a guy got executed around 33 AD but not even what he got executed for. As the article mentions, there were probably hundreds of itinerant preachers around that time that could have been convenient pegs to hang the rest of the story on.

We don't need to assume a guy got killed because there are multiple sources for Jesus's crucifixion by the Romans. There were definitely hundreds of itinereant preachers who could've spawned religions. One of them, Jesus, led to Christianity and a complex web of mythologies were constructed around him after his death.

Not really:

"But notice that now we don't even require that is considered essential in many church creeds. For instance, it is not necessary that Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate. Maybe he was, But even if we proved he wasn't that still does not vindicate mythicism. Because the 'real' Jesus may have been executed by Herod Antipas (as the Gospel of Peter in fact claims) or by Roman authorities in an earlier or later decade than Pilate (as some early Christians really did think). Some scholars even argue for an earlier century (and have some real evidence to cite)

Rome killed him. What scholars, exactly, are arguing for an earlier century?

According to what? The New Testament or someone citing the New Testament?

Most of the Pauline Epistles were indisputably written by a dude named Paul in the Levant a few decades after Jesus's death. He wrote about James. He wrote about actually existing churches and conflicts. These were not constructed a century later (except for the ones that obviously were,which has been determined via textual criticism and analysis) - they are much closer to contemporary than most classical historical figures! Just because it is in the Bible doesn't mean it's automatically fake. It is a corpus to which we can apply historical criticism like any other, not some exceptional fabrication.