I agree with everything you said here, but a few nuances should be acknowledged.
1) All mentions of Jesus as you stated were several years to decades after his death.
2) Language was very different back then
3) The Bible has gone through centuries of re-writes.
All this to say that I think it should be fact that a man named Jesus was alive during those times, but he could have been a normal man like everyone else too.
Firstly, the telephone game. If people write a book about you decades after your death, during a time where documentation was not a thing like today expect alot of innacuracies.
Secondly, if you teleported back to the time of Jesus our command of the english language would not let us understand anything anyone was saying back then. For example, if we lived during those times and I said: Rhakim was a good person, everyday he used to make soup and potatoes and hand it out to poor people daily.
It would not be necessary that what I said was true or not, I was merely describing the person, the actions I described need not be true, I used those analogies to describe the person.
So everything from words, language and intention of language were all different back then.
First off, I'm not an "Inerrant Word of God" guy, so minor deviations don't bother me at all. Differences in the text only matter if it makes some fundamental difference in my faith. And when you talk about different translations, revisions, different manuscripts, etc......99% of that has zero impact on how I understand God. With the 1% that's left that has some slight impact, I do my studies and do the best I can.
I disagree that it's a telephone game, because that assumes a world in which one person knows "the truth" and they share it with one other person, and it's this individualistic process. In reality, Christianity came about as part of a community. Paul's letters were written in the 50s and describe events going back to the 30s, he makes clear that there is a large, well-connected Christian community centered around Peter, John, and the other apostles. So when the Gospels were written in the 60s and 70s, we're not talking about some lone wolf remembering his stories. 30-40 years after Jesus's death, there would still be plenty people around who were there when that shyt happened, and everyone else would have been hearing the same stories about Jesus for decades. If the Gospel writer tried to tell stuff wrong, he would have thousands of people all over his ass to expose him. Why would the people of the church adopt a text that contradicted the stories they already knew about Jesus from those who were there?
Of course, that doesn't mean everything in them is absolutely perfect. Eyewitnesses can be unreliable, even if you have a lot of them. Some events might have been jammed together to make the narrative flow more smoothly, some of the numbers might be off (for example, I think there's one crazy chained guy near the pig herders in one gospel, but two of them were there in another gospel). But those are minor details. If something was seriously wrong, like actions were being attributed to Jesus that weren't in line with his character, or new stories were being made up that no one had ever heard, then why would the community take that gospel seriously? That's why the Gospel of Thomas and other apocryphal gospels were never accepted by the community, and only became popular in fringe groups whose followers had nothing to do with the original Christians. The stories just plain don't match what was known of Jesus's life and often are out of character with the person they already knew Jesus to be.
And which book do most Christians abide by and call the word of god? King James Version, the most recent version. How can you say, considering the telephone game, that the most recent book be the closest to the word of god written just when Britain cut ties with the pope and wanted to decouple catholicism from christianity only about a century or so after the end of the Byzantine empire?
Most Christians? I don't even know 5% of Christians who think the King James version is some exclusive "word of god". That's a very fringe movement and not one any church I've ever gone to supports.
And the King James version isn't the "most recent" version, so I'm not sure what you mean by claiming that - there are numerous translations from the last 200 years that are based on a firmer manuscript foundation of the oldest available Greek texts.
It's also worth pointing out that, contrary to popular myth, no one church has ever had control over the Biblical text. The Church of Alexandria, the Church of Constantinople, the Church of Antioch, they all existed back then independent of Rome. Coptic texts of the Bible are just as old as the Greek texts and older than the Latin texts, so how could the church in Rome change the Bible if they knew the Egyptians had the Bible too and would expose them if it was altered in any significant way?
Where is your proof of it? If I said Alexander the Great was raised from the dead you would want the evidence of it. I would have none to provide for you.
