Perhaps you've heard of the Jesus Seminar and its efforts to extract or distill the “true” historical essence of Jesus from what has been written about him.  At present, its chairs have made known that they are finding less and less reason to believe that the Jesus as we know him ever existed.     

When, recently, I was asked to respond to a few of the Seminar's claims, I did so, albeit briefly.  The issues to which I was asked to respond centered around the mentions of Jesus outside the Bible; the reliability of the eyewitness accounts; why the apostle Peter allegedly did not like the apostle Paul; why the gospel accounts differ; and whom Jesus believed himself to be.  I reproduce here the finished text.  Again, I address each issue briefly; a full response to each question could occupy many pages.
On Jesus' existence, at least three, if not four historians, three Roman and one Jewish, mention a certain “Christus” (the English translation of the Greek word for “messiah,” which in turn means “anointed one”) who appeared, attracted a following, then was crucified on a cross by the Roman authorities.  To this, although the Romans crucified literally thousands of people, only one was called “Christus” by the people of the time.

     The role of the eyewitness in the ancient world is one that is of course fraught with difficulty.  On the other hand, given that in this world the eyewitness was regarded as the sole source of information about a person or event, unless those listening to them had good reason not to, they generally believed them.  Certain details, particularly in Mark’s gospel, about the color of the grass when Jesus fed the 5,000; the words between Jesus and the centurion; and more, seem to indicate that the gospels represent the accounts of those who actually walked with Jesus.  As to the contentions that Paul despised Peter and John, we need to look at the Council of Jerusalem as it is described in Acts 15.  Here, the three men argued about how much Gentiles who converted should do to emulate Jewish (the first converts were of course Jews) customs of the time.  But as the Council progressed, they resolved their differences and each went his own way.  The church remained unified.

     Yes, Luke makes clear that he was not an eyewitness.  But he’s the only one who does. In line with the Greek historian Herodotus's methodologies, Luke indicates that he talked with eyewitnesses extensively before composing his account.  To a person, Matthew, Mark, and John intimate or state that they are writing about events they had witnessed.

     On point four, it’s no secret that the gospel accounts differ from each other.  They should:  they were written by four different people with four different approaches and agendas.  However, although each writer presented the material in his account differently, the essence of a given event is the same in all four accounts.  Each gospel was directed to and written for a different audience, so it’s logical that the writers would use different material or present the same material in a different way.  It’s clear that Matthew, Mark, and Luke drew from a common source (generally regarded as “Q”), whereas John, given his personal proximity to Jesus as well as the later date of his writing, presents many stories that do not appear in the other three.  He had a different perspective.

    This applies to the resurrection accounts, too.  Yes, they differ, but they are uniform in confirming the basic facts of the event.  In addition, we moderns must remember that the ancients had no problem with holding and telling four different accounts about the same person.  It was akin to different tribes telling variations of or taking different approaches to a common story about a certain person or event.  Everybody did it.  Many in the Middle East do so even today.

     Finally, sure, we could see Jesus in varying ways, but it seems to me that Jesus spent the bulk of his time presenting himself as the Son of Man, God in human form, who had come to invite all who wished to enter into the kingdom community of God.  While I’ve studied the evidence for Jesus being a revolutionary, Zealot, misguided Jewish prophet, or anything else, I’m still not convinced, not yet anyway, that he was anything other than what he consistently claimed to be, that is, the son of God.  He matched and fulfilled the Hebrew prophecies about Messiah and, all allowances for the supernatural character of the gospels aside, did things no one else had done.  Moreover, it seems to me that Paul and Peter, writing a couple of decades (which, in the ancient world, is an instant; Homer composed his account of the Trojan War 500 years after it ended) after Jesus was gone, repeatedly affirmed that Jesus was more than an insightful man.  They agreed that he was God.
     As I was sharing this information with a person who does not believe that Jesus is God, I added at this point that of course it is one thing to agree that the accounts are historically accurate and true.  It’s quite another to accept the theological claims they are making.  After all, that's the question every human being faces:  if the evidence for the divinity and work of Jesus is reliable and true, what are you going to do about it?