manuscripts of the new testament date back to the year 100.
not even 70 years after the events described.
He. That’s way more than enough time for events to become obscured by legend. Hell, by that time, it is almost certain that no one old enough to remember would have been dead.
Also, while that may be when the gospels were originally written, that does mean that they have not been tampered with over the coming centuries - indeed, there is evidence for such tampering. And the modern canon of the New Testament only established itself from 367 onwards, before which there had been a considerable variety of different canons and gospels, some of which having considerable differences towards the narrative that eventually became dominant.
to say that the new testament is entirely or even mostly false would be the same as saying that today we could write that the holocaust never happened and that hitler was a generous german leader and everyone would accept it without opposition.
Hitler was the dictator of one of a pretty important country for twelve years, during which he instituted a totalitarian regime, instituted racist and eugenicist policies that culmonated in industrialised genocide, killing millions from across all of Europe, and started a war for world conquest that would lay the entire continent to waste. His reign of terror and crimes against humanity have extensive amounts of documentary, photographic, audiorecorded and physical evidence. And despite all of this, there are plenty of people claiming “that the holocaust never happened and that hitler was a generous german leader”.
Jesus the Nazarene was a cult leader in the periphery of a peripheral province of an empire spanning much of the Known World, among a people whose native religion was highly particular and weird to most people. He was active for a few years before he made a pilgrimage to the nation’s most powerful religious, and religio-political, centre, where he rioted against the corruption and hypocrisy of the religious establishment while claiming to be a prophecised leader that was (originally) said to overthrow all the nation’s enemies and oppressors, leading to his execution, which his followers refused to accept as his end. All this in a time and place rife with religious discontent, charismatic sects, belief in miracles, and brutal suppression of protests against the foreign rule, and all this long before telecommunication. Jesus would have been a small scale event, unlikely to be noteworthy even to most people in Palestine at the time, and virtually impossible to verify or falsify, and that is assuming there would have been many outside of this yet another fringe religion who would have cared enough to refute this cult specifically.
if the new testament were false, the jews and other non-christians would have opposed the stories
They did.
and had them destroyed rather than re-written (almost 15,000 times, more than any other peice of ancient literature) and widely distributed.
On that note, there is a conspicious scarcity in the preservation of near-contemporary historiography specifically for the mid-780s AUC from the takeover of Christianity onwards…
