Lately I’ve heard people attacking the veracity of the fairy tale book with statements like “Jesus wasn’t real” or it was a psy op operation by the Romans that got out of control. And I hate talking about reddit but it’s basically the atheism mods policy over there that Jesus wasn’t real.
I usually rely on the Wikipedia as my litmus test through life, which shouldn’t work in theory but is great in practice:
Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus
Virtually all scholars agree that a Jewish man called Jesus of Nazareth did exist in Palestine in the 1st century CE. The contrary perspective, that Jesus was mythical, is regarded as a fringe theory.
Edit: My suggestion to any who would like to see my opinion changed (see above quote) is to get on the Wikipedia and work towards changing the page. My upvote goes to Flying Squid for reminding us “does not matter at all because that’s not who Christians worship”
Edit 2: practicality changed to practice
The question of the historicity of Jesus does not deal with any of the supernatural claims. It attempts to answer how Christianity started from a historical perspective. It is a debate between a real but ordinary person; or a fictional creation, the angel Jesus, from which the apostles “received revelation” in much the same way as Joseph Smith did from Moroni, Mohammad from Gabriel, and many modern pastors do from Jesus.
So, no, the virgin birth narrative is irrelevant to any historical Jesus. That was created decades after the beginning of Christianity as a response to the gospel of Mark saying Jesus was from Nazareth, but some readers and authors of the later gospels thought prophecy said the messiah would be from Bethlehem.