Do atheists believe that Jesus Christ lived on earth approximately 2000 years ago?
Because there is no “official” atheist position on anything aside from the lack of belief in a god, this particular belief will vary greatly from person to person. You will find a great deal of scholarly discussion as to the existence of the “historical Jesus”, which would be Jesus/Joshua the Jewish man living under the rule of Rome who would have been executed at approximately 33 A.D. Historians seem to disagree on this, and sometimes it is based on (in my opinion) their pre-existing bias as Christians or Atheists. The physical existence of Jesus is not definitively proven in the same way that his contemporaries (Caesar Augustus) or his predecessors (Socrates) have been. However most historical aspects of the Gospels line up with the known facts, and the existence of his followers can be verified nearly all the way back to the conjectured time of his death. So the existence of such a man can’t be ruled out. It is hard to say, based on evidence, whether it can be definitively proven. B
Jesus existed approximately 2000 years ago. And so did Jesus, and Jesus, and Jesus, and Jesus, and Jesus, and that other Jesus, and whats his name, oh right, Jesus, and about a few hundred other Jesuses. Which makes the whole issue of using 1st century B.C.E. and 1st century C.E. documents to claim that Jesus Christ existed somewhat problematical: which Jesus were they talking about? None of them establish which Jesus they were talking about, only that a guy named Jesus appears in the documents. Add in that Josephus was clearly rewritten by Christians wanting to claim there was a Jesus Christ (a devout Jew would not refer to anyone as “The Messiah”), and there really is no historical way to establish that a Jesus Christ ever existed.
