No evidence for Jesus, how about the New Testament.
Historians reject the passion narrative as being literally true, Jesus as established by historical methods has little to do with the literal evangelical representation of 'Jesus Christ of Nazareth'. The strongest argument for Jesus or a figure that christianity was based on, historically speaking, is the likelihood that christianity arose based on someone vs not based on anyone. This case is made because there is an absence of contemporary accounts of Jesus. The only individuals who claim a literal jesus christ exist on the fringe and are not taken seriously by anyone.
The problem is that you don't seem to have a grasp on historical methodology or what is considered the 'norm' as far as what is historical vs what is not. The bible is NOT a history book, nor is it used as a history book. It barely coincides with archaeological studies from the 8th century BCE on, prior to this it is apparently and grossly unaware of the actual historical context that took place in the region it claims events occurred. The bible doesn't seem to actually know what happened in the 4th - 2nd millennium BCE, it certainly asserts things to have happened, but none of them correlate with what we find archaeologically speaking and in the records of other civilizations.
Whether or not Jesus existed is irrelevant to establishing the authenticity of Christianity, since the vast majority of the OT
conclusively never happened. Theologically speaking, the most important events in the OT simply never happened.
not to mention how many believers in Jesus are there today, BILLIONS.
There are tens of thousands of disparate christian denominations that disagree with each other as much as they splinter and disagree with themselves. So implying they are a singular representation of an ideological belief is grossly dishonest on your part. This is true for any religion, Islam also numbers in the billions and is quickly about to surpass christian populations demographically speaking. ( 2 billion christians in the world vs 1.6 billion muslims )
Are you really such an idiot as to believe that the truth hood of a religion is dependent upon how many people believe it?
By that reasoning alone you should prepare to be a Muslim, Christianity has had nearly an 800 year lead on Islam yet Islam is about to over take christianity in the numbers game.
And the New Testament was not written long after Jesus' life but shortly after
It was written and composed several life times afterwards. The council of nicea cherry picked doctrine that was agreed upon and deemed anything else a heresy, the new testament didn't exist until this period. ( 325 CE, First Council of Nicea held )
You obviously have never researched anything.
. And that Old Testament which contains many references to Jesus' coming are much older and proven to have been written before Jesus' coming.
Nothing in Jewish eschatology or Jewish Messianic prophecy has anything worth mentioning to do with Jesus. Christian notions of messianic prophecy actually ignore jewish messianic prophecy and often concentrate on poor translations as well as just literally making it up. This criticism goes both ways since Jews do it as well, but the point is that the 'prophecy' isn't black and white, it is so vague/nebulous as to invite any absurd rationale.
You obviously have never researched anything. Your most laughably stupid assertion yet is the notion of having researched the 'second coming', the problem is that the 'second coming' has nothing to do with any claim of prophecy in the OT. It is totally an abstract concept, like many theological concepts, made up as a further rationale to explain away an earlier problem. In this case, Jesus doesn't actually fulfill jewish messianic prophecy, how could he possibly be the messiah? Oh wait.. the second coming.. he'll do that later.
Right. The jews didn't believe it either.
They speak of Jesus' coming and narrow it down to the EXACT YEAR...
Wow.. There are HUGE disagreements on when jesus was born, what he did, when he died.. etc. You know absolutely NOTHING about higher biblical criticism, science, or historical methodology. You're just pulling this crap out of your ass.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_religious_groups ( Numbers of Christians vs Muslims )
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Council_of_Nicaea ( Dating of first uniform christian codex )