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There is no contemporaneous evidence of Jesus.
Nobody wrote about him while he was supposedly alive.
The accounts in the Bible of Jesus' life are the work of a few men writing in a language foreign to any possible Jesus of Nazareth,1 years after his purported life. It is thin evidence. Considering that some of the writers apparently copied2 the work of others of them, it appears even more dubious.
And it may be generous to allow that he existed while disputing his divinity — but Jesus without his divinity is not Jesus. It's a sparse biography without the miracles — and we have nothing of him as a teen or younger man, either. There's almost nothing there. It's conventional to agree that Jesus the man existed — it's polite.
Flavius Josephus wrote a paragraph that's now called the Testimonium Flavianum.3 This is the strongest non-biblical evidence for the story of Jesus — a story of key importance in Western culture. The Testimonium — three sentences — is clearly at least partially forged.
A short reference, no more than a comment that was probably not even written by a man who was not even born until A.D. 37 is the principal external support for the assertion that Jesus even existed.
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2. It's not any wonder that the Gospels are "synoptic," or of similar perspective. What is notable is that they do not concur with each other more fully.
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3. The Testimonium Flavianum was written (probably, mostly) by Flavius Josephus, a Jewish man who produced a voluminous history of the Jewish people in the late 1st century.
The Testimonium Flavianum:
"Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews, and many of the Gentiles. He was the Christ;* and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him, for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him; and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct to this day."
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*Josephus was a practicing Jew who never believed the "Christhood" of Jesus Christ. It would have been for him a serious lapse of reason to write that "[Jesus] was the Christ." The phrase is more likely to have been fabricated by somebody else.
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1. It's possible that Nazareth did not exist in the first century AD.
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