This article about Jesus’ existence by Lawrence Mykytiuk is a perfect example of why I accept Jesus’ historicity only tentatively, not on the same level as I accept, say, the historicity of Pilate or Tiberius. Indeed, Mykytiuk is a very able scholar, I previously read his books about identification of Biblical persons in archaeological/numismatic data. So we would expect him to present the best evidence for Jesus’ historicity.

Yet he relies on the same stale Tacitus and Josephus references. Tacitus is a very late source and his mention of Christ is very short, saying that he was executed by Pilate. He probably got this bit from the Christians themselves and he would have no discernible reason to doubt something that trivial.

As for Josephus, we know for certain that Testimonium Flavianum was tampered with, which means that its authenticity as a whole is in doubt. There were claims of “more authentic” versions in some Arabic translations, but they were later shown to have been derived from the tampered TF.

Mykytiuk still goes with the “authentic core” hypothesis, relying on the linguistic arguments based on certain expressions, but there are no less able mainstream scholars who say that these same expressions are more characteristic of Eusebius than Josephus (see e.g. an academic article by Ken Olson and an easier to read blog post by the same).

The minor reference to James, brother of Jesus “called the Christ” is also not at all unambiguous, it can be convincingly shown to refer to the high priest Jesus ben Damneus, with “called the Christ” being most probably an accidental interpolation. Mykytiuk only deals with the “outright forgery” hypothesis, which is indeed not convincing, but never with the “accidental interpolation” hypothesis (nor with the reasons of why a mention of our Jesus in this context is highly unlikely, nor with the reasons of why no other authors ever seem to cite this fragment even when it would have been in their interest to do so…).

Yes, all this can be argued about, but in the end we’re still left with two extremely ambiguous pieces of external evidence. And this is the best a good mainstream scholar is able to offer.

I still accept that Jesus is slightly more likely to be historical than non-historical (the “man -> man + myth” hypothesis seems a bit simpler than “myth -> man + myth” in this case). But there can be no certainty about this.