My "spurious claims that there are thousands of historical references to Jesus made in his day"????

When did I claim that? I know of no such references, and haven't heard of such.

I simply think it is very likely that he existed, that's all, and that he was a spiritual teacher and healer whose teachings had a dramatic effect on a relatively small group of followers in Judea at the time he was alive and immediately after, and that some of those followers then tried to launch a reform movement in the Jewish faith, failed in that, and instead ended up launching a new religion which eventually found favor in Rome. I am not aware of these thousands of historical references from his day that you claim I alluded to. Never have I heard of them.

If you think I did, you have misunderstood something I said earlier.

Yes, Christ (as presented in the sacred literature) is symbolic of "the sun", as well as "the son"...and that is probably why they say that the sun went dark at his death...not because it literally did, but because it's an allegorical statement of the type that spiritual texts are absolutely full of. Spiritual texts in those days were not written for the common people, who mostly couldn't read. They were written for adepts, people who had studied such matters most of their lives, and were familiar with the kind of allegory and metaphor used in the writings.

It's only in relatively recent historical times that the Bible became a book read by the masses of common people, and taken literally by many or most of them.

Did you ever hear of the "mystery schools" in Egypt? Spiritual adepts studied at those schools in Jesus' day, and they learned to interpret symbols that would have been utterly opaque to the masses, and would have been taken literally. Those passages were symbolic.

I think the authors you mention were people on an emotional crusade. They wanted to believe Jesus never existed for their own personal reasons, for their own satisfaction, just like the people who leap on any thread such as this one any time they see it. Why they wanted to believe that would depend on their personal history, I suppose. It could be for a great many reasons.

It might be because they had a grudge against the church. It might be that they simply liked being "right" about something they thought most people were too stupid to have figured out for themselves. Every ego is highly drawn toward being "right" in that manner, because it feels soooooo good to know you're right and many, many others are wrong. It's really a great way of feeling extra special and "in the know". Very appealing indeed.

There were, I'm sure, a lot of other new spiritual teachers roaming around back then too, with their followers. (There always are. There are right now. There always will be.) Most of them have been forgotten by history, and you can find no reference to them anywhere, but not John the Baptist and not Jesus...they have been remembered bigtime. That suggests to me that they most likely did exist.

And my suspicion that they did exist is every bit as credible as your suspicion that they did not...more so, in fact, because you HAVE no evidence whatsoever, cultural or otherwise. You just have an outright denial.

I don't find that denial convincing of anything except the denier's own emotional need to be "right" about something that he doesn't like for some reason.

I'm not saying the gospel writers and Paul were accurate in everything they said, or even in half of it. I'm not saying they didn't change stuff and make stuff up. I bet they did. I am saying that they got the idea to write about Jesus in the first place because he had actually existed, and done some notable things in his time, and THAT's what GAVE them the idea to write about him! After that I'm sure they embellishend, invented, and put their own slant on a great deal of what they wrote.

So what? Would it really be that surprising that they screwed around some with the record of such a man's activities and exaggerated things or got things wrong?

Why WOULD the Romans have mentioned Jesus in their histories of his time? He meant nothing to them at that time. They couldn't have cared less. He was no apparent threat to Rome, only to the Jewish church of the time, in that he challenged the religious status quo.

Why would any Roman historian in the first 100 years A.D. have given it a moment's thought?