> There is far more historical evidence for Jesus than for Julius Caesar.
Riiiight.
Do you actually expect anyone to take you seriously after trotting *that* out?
You are either historically challenged or are being intellectually dishonest in regards to evaluating the evidence of the historic person of Jesus. The following article written by Edward Warren summarizes the comparison better than I could in my own words.
Much of our knowledge of the Caesars is dependent upon the writings of the Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus, who wrote about A.D. 100-115. We have no originals from his hand and only half of the thirty books of histories which he wrote have survived the ravages of time in the form of two manuscript copies. One of these manuscripts is from the tenth century and the other from the eleventh century. That means that there are time gaps of 800 to 1000 years from the originals written by Tacitus himself to the only two copies of his work that we presently possess. Now, while that is quite a distance in time removed from the original writings, this kind of manuscript evidence does not cause undue concern among our classical scholars.
About this same quality of manuscript evidence is characteristic of all the classical histories. Consider Julius Caesar's account of his Gallic Wars, which he wrote between 58 and 50 B.C. While there are several good manuscript copies, the oldest is about 900 years removed from Caesar. Quite a gap! Then, there are two historians from deep antiquity, Thucydides and Herodotus, who wrote during the fifth century before Christ. Of the eight manuscript copies from Thucydides, the earliest is about A.D. 900. That leaves a gap of some 1300 years from the original history to our best copy! And the manuscript attestation for Herodotus is said to be about the same. Yet there is not a classical scholar who would yield a single manuscript copy simply because they are removed by such a gap of time from the originals.
A striking contrast exists between the abundance of New Testament manuscripts and the comparative poverty of the classical copies. There are right now some four thousand copies of the Greek New Testament. Some of these are very ancient, two of them dating back to A.D. 350, leaving a time gap of only 250 years from the original writers to our copies. These two oldest and best copies (each in a book form called a codex) are the Codex Siniticus (so called since it was found in 1844 in the monastery of St. Catherine at the foot of Mt Sinai by the German Bible scholar Constantine Tischendorf) and the Codex Vaticanus (so named because it is kept in the Vatican in Rome). This evidence alone is superior to that for Tacitus' writings. Then there is the Codex Alexandrinus, which is displayed along with the Sinaiticus in the British Museum, and the Codex Bezae from the fifth or sixth century, now located at Cambridge University. And in addition to these, there are hundreds more copies of the quality of the classical manuscripts.
Inasmuch as the classical writings are received as authentic histories on a manuscript basis, which is not nearly as qualitative as that for the New Testament, then how much more should we be confident of the authentic nature of the New Testament. Professor Bruce makes an observation from this basis, apparently with tongue-in-cheek, that "If the New Testament were a collection of secular writings, their authenticity would generally be regarded as beyond all doubt."(27) Also, the Jewish scholar, J. Klausner, said, "If we had ancient sources like those in the Gospels for the history of Alexander or Caesar, we should not cast any doubt upon them whatsoever."(28)
27. Bruce, New Testament Documents, p. 15.
28. Will Durant quoting Klausner, Caesar and Christ, p. 557.
My credability has withstood external review. Too bad yours hasn't on this topic.