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Notes -
Do the religious people on here actually believe in Christianity? Like do you actually believe that Christ rose from the dead, Garden of Eden, Jesus is the son of God, the Trinity, virgin birth, etc? Or is more Deism and you like the community from going to church? I have a hard time believing most adult converts i.e. JD Vance actually believe these things, but I'm curious if I'm wrong here.
Yes. "Christ rose from the dead" is a very believable claim, just on the historical evidence - the rest of the core claims of Christianity are not particularly hard to believe if you believe that (e.g. if Christ rose from the dead then He certainly was not an ordinary human; thus believing that He is the Son of God, was born of a virgin, and are coming back again as He claimed aren't very difficult to swallow).
The one exception would be that while I tend to believe in a ~literal Garden of Eden, it's not really skin off of my nose if the Genesis account(s), not being written for 21st century scientists, was not intended to be interpreted as 21st century scientists would prefer to interpret them. (Notwithstanding this I toy with ideas that harmonize the Eden account with what 21st century scientists have deduced about the nature of early man, but that's more because I find it interesting than that I need to understand everything written in Scripture to believe in it.)
I'm starting to think that if "Christ rose from the dead" is something that historical evidence supports, despite all the other evidence to the contrary of such things being possible, then it is not that I should believe in the return of Christ more, but that I should believe in historical evidence less - including other areas of history.
I think what you end up finding if you adopt this approach is that all of reality becomes, to varying degrees, less comprehensible. It also makes the cherry-picking problem much worse.
People who generally evaluate historical writings as more-or-less accurate +/- the usual human margin of error and bias and then put their finger on the scale when anything supernatural happens are arguably cherry-picking what they want to read, but at least they have a methodology to it and you can agree on a certain level of ground truth (e.g. most non-Christian historians don't deny that Christ or Paul existed, for instance).
Whereas if you just insist that all historical evidence is downright bad, any pretense of methodological criteria can quickly go out the window and people can just cherry-pick what they like. You might think that the end result here is merely being more reserved about making historical claims, but in real life I think it ends up in weird places like believing in Great Tartaria.
I wouldn't insist that all historical evidence is bad. But from what I have read, an average layman does believe popular history more than they should. There's this "historical evidence on Sparta was largely written down by Sparta's political opponents" factoid that I recall of note.
Sure, I think careful scholars are cognizant of that sort of thing.
Early writings on Christ are interesting because we both have early writings from Christians (who mostly didn't profit much by believing in Christ as per their own writings) and writings from neutral or hostile third parties.
I haven't read as much of the early writings from and on Christians as I would like, but from what I can tell the pro- and anti- Christian writings often read exactly as you would expect, e.g. the Christians are writing about church discipline, doctrine, and defending their beliefs as intellectually legitimate and their opponents are calling them gullible retards from first principles.
I get the impression that the main difference between second century theological debates about Christianity and Reddit today is that a lot of Christian arguments have remained the same (sans the ones aimed at the pagan gods), whereas "Christ was not the Son of God, merely a magician" or "Christ was not the Son of God since God would never come to Earth as a peasant" have fallen out of favor. "Christianity will destroy our way of life because they are opposed to infanticide and licentiousness" still has some traction though.
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