Whether or not someone believes that Jesus (the man) ever existed, the New Testament was written some time after the incidents in his life that it purports to describe, and it was written by a number of different people, each one of them with his own particular concerns and his own political "axe to grind", so to speak. They were all telling their favorite version of the story, and they were probably all doing it with religio-political purposes in mind. That being the case, it is hardly surprising that some of the messages in there seem to be contradictory at times, and there is no guarantee of any sort that any specific account is accurate or that anything Jesus is reputed to have said in it is accurate. It might be. It might not.

Furthermore, if you take all the things that have been said by ANY human being during the course of a few tumultuous years...things overheard by others around him...and you repeat them later as best you recall them...then you are going to get contradictory statements, things that don't seem to make sense, things that will be misunderstood because the reader is not aware of the original context they were said in, etc.

All of that should be reasonably obvious, yes?

The only thing that will prevent a person from being open-minded and considering such possibilities is blind faith. Blind faith of 2 opposite varieties.

1. The first: It's all the Word of God and without flaw.

2. The second: None of it ever happened and there was not even any such man as Jesus.

The first is the blind faith of the fundamentalist religious person, and it's motivated by emotion, not reason. The believer loves his religion for its own sake, regardless of reason. He gets satisfaction from believing in it completely.

The second is the blind faith of the fundamentalist atheist, and it's motivated by emotion, not reason. The believer hates religion for its own sake, regardless of reason. He gets satisfaction from denying it completely.

That kind of blind faith will tell you a lot about the emotional history of the above 2 believers (who are both fanatics), but it probably won't tell you anything useful at all about Jesus.