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You're kind of going off the rails a bit here. The case for the historical Jesus doesn't come out of Paul or any other part of the Bible, but rather out of accounts from ancient historians that have been validated as best as those sources can be.
And if you are an Atheist, why do you seem so troubled by the idea that the man might have existed? Why couldn't there have been a subversive Rabbi talking truth to power in Judea, who got on the wrong side of the local government , leading to his death, and further leading his followers to do a bit of (literal) hero worship? None of that requires any belief in his divinity, and fits all the available historical sources.
Actually, most of the evidence of a historical Jesus comes precisely from the Bible. The earliest mention of Jesus outside of the Gospels comes from Josepheus, who was not a contemporary of Jesus, and the oldest surviving manuscripts are early medieval Christian copies.
Those who argue for the historicity of Jesus base the claim mostly in the early preserved copies of the gospels and historical accounts of early Christians. There is a little more to it, but it basically comes down to the presumed works of those who were presumably contemporaries of Jesus.
Such as who? Tell me the name of these historians, how they knew what they reported was the truth, what they said, and prove that what they said hasn't been tampered with.
I am an atheist. And I am not troubled by it. I am upset that people are believing in something that they do not have good evidence for and using that to alter their lives. It is not an academic question.
There could have been but that isn't the claim that is you weakening the claim so very much that you hope I will concede it is possible. The exact opposite of what we do in other branches of knowledge. Superstitions shrink in claims as time goes on. Which is why horoscopes went from predicting the fate of empires to telling you if you should break up with your cheating partner.
Put another way how is what you are doing now any different than people who have reduced skydaddy to a diest god and demand that since I can't know what happened in the first billionth of a second of the Big Bang I have to concede magic?
I follow evidence where it leads, I don't look for a way to sneak a claim in by watering it down to nothing.
It does? Josphius, even if everything we have from him was unaltered, doesn't say that he was a subversive Rabbi. Tactius doesn't say that either. Plus it doesn't really fit in. We aren't told by those historians why he was executed, what the nature of the trial was, and most importantly why he alone was instead of the 12.
If it was because he was going against Judaism we know that the Phrariess had a secret police and a rule against handing over heretics to secular authorities (see the Talmud). If it was because Jesus was going against Rome, well the Romans had a way of dealing with that and making sure that anyone even remotely connected to it was taken care of. And yet we are told that both groups acted in a contrary way. Joint probability here.
This is what people mean when they keep bringing up that even a minimum historical Jesus requires so many crazy things to happen in a precise sequence of events.
Didn't you just make my point for me? You are debating why Josephus mentioned Jesus's execution, not whether he did or not. True, we don't really know whether his account had been altered before we got to it, but we're never going to have that certainty.
No. I conceded a point to show how your idea still doesn't work "even if everything we have from him was unaltered,".
We have two passages from this man.
One that refers to James the Brother and contains the exact turn of phrase that Matthew uses in 1:16 "legomenos Christos" "so-called Annoited one". Given the complete context of the passage and the exact quote of the Bible it is most likely a fraud. We know that there was a tradition that James was killed and we have a page that talks about a James and another guy named Jesus. To make it refer to James the Just would take a two words addition. It doesn't even make sense since it requires James to be very old, for a known hertic to be appointed head of the temple, and for the general population (who were hostile to James) to be upset that he died, and James to be descended from the temple priest clan which means he can't be from David line, a claim he would have had to defend for his brothers claim of son of god status. None of it works.
The second passage is so obviously fraud even religious scholars don't defend it. It expressed 2nd century Trinity ideas, it isn't in Josphius writing style, it doesn't fit in the context of the chapter, it goes against Messianic ideas that Josphius had, it isn't written the same way he describes other Messiahs, and describes Jesus in glowing terms that no religious Jewish person would use.
My point was even if we somehow someway accept that Josphius really did write this stuff in 71AD it still doesn't get us anywhere since he could have just been repeating what Christians told him without doing any work of verification.