If there had been one source of Christian antiquity that mentioned a historical Jesus (e.g., Mark) and everyone else was based on what that source had to say, then possibly you could argue that this person made Jesus up and everyone else simply took the ball and ran with it.

But …

But how can you make a convincing case if we’re talking about thirty or so independent sources that know there was a man Jesus? These sources are not all living in the same village someplace so they are egging each other on. They didn’t compare notes. They are independent of one another and are scattered throughout the Mediterranean. They each have heard about the man Jesus from their own sources of information, which heard about him from their own sources of information.

That must mean that there were hundreds of people at the least who were talking about the man Jesus. One of them was the apostle Paul, who was talking about Jesus by at least the year 32 CE, that is, two years after the date of Jesus’ death.

Paul, as I will point out, actually knew, personally, Jesus’ own brother James and his closest disciples Peter and John. That’s more or less a death knell for the Mythicist position, as some of them admit. I’ll get to Paul in a subsequent note. Here I am simply stressing that the Gospel traditions themselves provide clear evidence that Jesus was being talked about just a few years after his life in Roman Palestine.