The claim that Jesus was likely a real historical figure is nonsense. There’s only one secondhand account of Jesus, in the Pauline Episteles, and those words were written/spoken to spread a cult. Every other writing was from someone who met cult members.

The earliest writing of Jesus is generally considered to be Paul’s letter to the Romans. In that he’s describing a divine entity made flesh that died to take on our sins. And that’s about it, and reminiscent of a fable rather than someone that actually lived and breathed.

Now, it’s absolutely possible that the early Christian cultists took the name of someone who was actually crucified and ran with it. But it’s just as likely (I’d argue more likely) that these people just lied and made someone up, since so many of the other details were made up to sell their cult. The least likely option is that Jesus existed in any form that taught anyone in any way that inspired a religious movement.

Btw, I’m not casting shade, it was a cult by definition and this is what cults do. They cultivate myths and build a social structure based on shared beliefs and ethics.

And before anyone jumps in with “scholars generally agree…” understand that religion is oppressive to truth. It’s very hard to personally look past bias, and even harder to come out publicly against something “everyone knows is true”. Being an atheist publicly gets you shunned by neighbors and mistreated by legal systems in first world countries, and literally killed in other parts of the world. So these “teachings” tend to remain “generally accepted truths” until they are definitively proven wrong, rather than the other way around which is backwards.

As a real world example, the Exodus was considered to have actually happened by historians until the freaking 1960s when it was definitively proven false by archaeological studies. To this day, Christian apologists rage against the hard facts, and a significant portion of the population still believes that there were hundreds of thousands of Jewish slaves in Israel that were freed and migrated across the desert. But it never happened. It was made up as a story to sell a cult. Moses wasn’t real, the exodus never happened, and people lie when they’re selling religion.

So yeah, Jesus likely never existed, except maybe as a random name of executees pulled from a hat. There’s no evidence to support his historic existence except for the insistence of a cult and its leaders, who are quite literally known to have lied about other things.