1. Actually, the Romans were often notoriously poor record keepers, and their historians have to be read with a grain of salt and really scholarly cross-referencing to get the true picture. 2. It would have taken a massively complicit chain of people transcending time, distance, languages, and cultures to perpetuate a hoax of such magnitude. 3. Christianity spread amazingly fast across the empire, encompassing all strata, including upper class aristocratic women. 4. More is known about Jesus's death than the method of deaths of many Roman emperors. How did Gordian III die, at the hand or command of Philip, or was he killed in battle with the Sassanians? 4. Paul's letters, written in the mid-first century, for example to the Romans, etc., assume a very high level of knowledge and organization to churches in wildly disparate regions of the empire. 5. True, many religious beliefs spanning huge swaths of time in antiquity, and yes, of the dying god. Christianity spread fast and widely, for its message. 6. Jesus was for all intents and purposes a small time Jew, whose self-imposed mission was to the Jews almost totally exclusively. 7. There are indeed differences among the gospels, literarily and in details. Yes, they were written by men, there are instances of amalgamation of certain events, but also great agreement and clear details that following the themes of redaction criticism are not dependent on each other. 8. The evangelists were literate, very much so, and they did without doubt draw upon huge streams of oral tradition, streams that go back to Jesus. 9. There is actually much about Jesus that is embarrassing in extremely high degree to Jesus himself, cringingly so. 10. The four evangelists did indeed have differing theological viewpoints about the mission and very nature of Jesus. These strands can be uniquely traced. They were confronted by a man who defied easy categorization, and who, yes, was believed by huge crowds to have worked wonders, and the use of the passive verb there is intentional, was believed to have... This very point is explored fully by scholars who cannot be dispensed with as mere apologists. 11. Jesus cannot, on not only true-believer perspectives, but empirically so, separated from his miracles, exorcisms, and healings, hence so much existing dispassionate study on those deeds he was believed to have performed. Yes, I do find these conclusions reached very convincing, and true, that's my opinion. But I can't think otherwise. I do invite you to read some of these case by case studies. 12. Yes, there is disagreement about exactly when the gospels were written, but there is also wide consensus. And, yes, the church fathers mentioned disagreed about all sorts of things as to church organization and doctrine, often cruelly so, hence Constantine convening a bunch of them to agree. But there was also amazing convergence, hence the fast growth of the church, which, yes, as the centuries passed, diverged into plural. Ok, I'm done. I just rattled all this admitted rambling off the top of my head, disjointed as it admittedly is. But in the end, to me, it is a disjointed history, and I again invite you to read some of these hard rational studies that are a delight, if nothing else academically, and make up your own minds after further study.