Was Jesus an Historical Figure?

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Some conservative Christian scholars take a Preterist interpretation of eschatology in which the things Jesus predicted would occur imminently in that Jesus was only referring to the destruction of the Jerusalem and the temple in 70 CE and not the end of the world. They believe the prophecies about the eschaton were fulfilled either partially or in full in the first century. But I believe Preterism is a frank concession of the fact that Jesus did not return as was expected from the earliest days of Christianity until recently. It is one thing for skeptics to scoff, it's quite another to see Christians re-invent their eschatology to accommodate this glaring problem. Now it is true that the eschaton had to do with the destruction of Jerusalem (see the parallel passages in Matt. 24:15–17 and Mark 13:14 compared with Luke 21:20 , where it says to watch for when “ Jerusalem is surrounded by armies”). But this tactic denies the obvious meaning of what Jesus was saying—not to mention that the rest of the New Testament authors who assumed such talk implied the destruction of the Roman Empire . How else can we understand the following words on Jesus’ lips: “Nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be great earthquakes, and in various places plagues and famines; and there will be terrors and great signs from heaven” (Luke 21:10 )? It was not only going to be the end of all of the kingdoms of men on earth but a total cosmic catastrophe in which the stars literally fall from heaven following which God inaugurates a   literal kingdom with Jesus reigning from Jerusalem. But this never happened in their lifetimes as was predicted. The only reason Christians gerrymander around the plain sense of these New Testament texts, in Michael Martin’s words, “is that apologists have reinterpreted Scripture in an implausible way in order to save Christianity from refutation.”