Why Jesus really did exist, personal opinion

For a very long time after losing my confidence in Christianity, I was bewildered by the lack of proofs that Jesus existed, and the relative strength of some of the Jesus-Myth theories' arguments. I was in a vacuum whether Jesus really did exist or not, since I could find neither the Jesus-existence arguments nor the Jesus-myth arguments convincing, until I saw a serious historian making a Youtube video series validating the arguments from a historians perspective. This series can be found here: Fishers of Evidence.

Fishers of Evidence easily sank my Josephus three-point verification argument for Josephus actually referring to Jesus. My three-point verification argument was formulated as follows:

★ Josephus's Antiquities of the Jews claims that Jesus existed and was the Messiah in a completely unlikely and obviously interpolated glorification from a Jew that was on the losing side in a war against the Romans, and now considers emperor Vespasian being the real Messiah. Someone (whom everybody suspect is the Christian historian Eusebius) messed with the text. ★ On the other hand Origen complains against Josephus that he doesn't regard Jesus as Messiah (Eusebius had no chance to make a scribble on Origen's texts), and ★ we have alternative versions of Josephus in Syriac and Arabic that doesn't praise Jesus but instead regard him as a magician. ERGO – I thought – Josephus must really have written about a real Jesus, Josephus was three-point verified in analogy of verifying a HTTPS web server (Josephus) with a Certificate Authority (Origen).

Update 190717: This three-point verification is now doubly falsified because the "alternate versions" of Testimonium Flavianum has been proven[?] to be spurious.

Except the Fishers of Evidence just asked where from Josephus got his information. Plausibly from some Christian, which in the phase of history when Josephus wrote books, was more likely to believe that Jesus was a real person. The three-point verification system just verified that Josephus wrote something.

Now, a much heavier argument why Jesus existed is the Onomastic argument, which is an unlikely application of statistics. It claims that the Gospels are referring to (mostly) real persons, that probably existed, based on their names. The names in the Gospels distribute fairly similar to the names found on archeological tombstones in the region of Judea and Galilee. In fiction names are chosen as to not collide with each other so that confusion does not occur. For the Gospels to have been written as fiction, the author must either unlikely take the names of a clearly delimited group of people, keeping the names of all of them, and then fantasize a completely fictional story around them, or, impossibly: guess that readers of the Gospels in the future will doubt the content, and therefore contrive a random distribution of persons, that counterparts the statistics of real persons in the geographical vicinity. Statistics was invented in the 17th century Europe. ERGO: not necessarily Jesus, but most of the persons in the Gospels must have existed. It is less likely then that the main character Jesus is mythical than say one of the Jameses.

Henceforth I will write this blog as if Jesus the man really existed. The Jesus-mythicists sometimes have good arguments, but their main case is weak.