The evidence which I described as ‘anecdotal’ starts a mere twenty or thirty years after Jesus’s death, and comes from sources who didn’t have any particular interest in promoting the Christian agenda. It seems that I may be unlikely to convince you, but if you’ve already got a strong opinion on this it might help to come at it from the other direction and start with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_myth_theory#No_independ... first.
Personally, I don’t really think it matters much either way (the events of a few decades being much less influential than the following two millennia of activities by people who did believe he existed), so I default to taking the word of people who’ve actually studied the matter in depth; but as he was one of several Roman-era Messiah claimants wandering around (we know of at least two others, and there were probably more whose names never made it into the histories we have) it seems reasonable that the group which happened to catch on would have also originally coalesced around an actual person.
Personally, I don’t really think it matters much either way (the events of a few decades being much less influential than the following two millennia of activities by people who did believe he existed), so I default to taking the word of people who’ve actually studied the matter in depth; but as he was one of several Roman-era Messiah claimants wandering around (we know of at least two others, and there were probably more whose names never made it into the histories we have) it seems reasonable that the group which happened to catch on would have also originally coalesced around an actual person.