Even if one accepts the scant evidence that Jesus existed, there is no objective evidence he was anything but human, and the gospels are anonymous hearsay.
On the contrary the Gospels are evidence (but not proof), they are what we’d reasonably expect to find if the claims were true. What else could one expect if the events were witnessed and efforts made to record them and preserve that record?
What would you have done, had you witnessed such events first hand two thousand years ago? what could you do beyond what was done? No photographs, no voice recordings, no movie footage.
Further, there is no way to argue the accounts are untrue without first choosing specific assumptions, one must assume certain things in order to argue that the accounts are false.
No, at least not solely, here is a reasonable article explaining the historical method. As you can see historians identify secondary sources, primary sources and material evidence, such as that derived from archaeology, for example, and these are not merely opinion.
Well there are plenty of historians who are familiar with this yet conclude Christ existed and the claims are true.
You’re using an argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy, to try and reverse the burden of proof. I don’t need to reject anything, but I can and do withhold belief from all claims that are unsupported by sufficient objective evidence, or in this case any. FYI a miracle is nothing more than an unevidenced appeal to mystery, and it is by definition an argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy that leaps to the unevidenced assumption of divine causation in the absence of a natural or scientific explanation, how many of these has science disproved?
No, I disagree that this is argumentum ad ignorantiam. Of course there’s a burden of proof and you do need a reason other than whim to reject something, you surely have to apply some process to a claim to be able to categorize it as “acceptable” or not.
You say “I can and do withhold belief from all claims that are unsupported by sufficient objective evidence” but such a position requires a clear definition of what is “objective evidence” I just said that the NT is evidence, but you choose to believe it isn’t. If the record was literally, to all intents and purposes, true, then where does that leave you?
The problem the atheists have is one of reconciliation, they cannot reconcile claims like those in the NT with their assumptions about reality, change the assumptions or at least question them and the problem starts to diminish.