The first thing to note about the argument presented below is the implicit and false equivalence drawn between the nature of the historical record as regards Jesus on one hand, known entirely from anonymous and highly mythologized ancient literary sources, and Hannibal on the other, attested in ancient historiographical texts by authors who are themselves known to history and who followed the accepted practices of ancient historiography. The question we must ask in assessing the differences is: Do we know of the bare existence of the Carthaginian general known by the name of Hannibal entirely from literary sources?
The answer is, flatly, no. The series of conflicts between Rome in the republican era and the Phoenecian (Punic) city in North Africa of Carthage known as the Punic Wars certainly occurred. It is true that the details of these ancient conflicts are known to us from extant literary sources, but in the case of such widely disruptive and geopolitically significant events, we have available to us the wider scope of the history of the period as an external control on our use and interpretation of those sources. Simply put, the history of the Roman Republic and the later events that led to the first Principate under Augustus in the following centuries require the Punic Wars in order to be coherent. Rome was in significant military conflict with Carthage for two generations and the consituent battles of those wars ranged across the Mediterranean region. Their effects were felt not just in Italy and North Africa, but in Celtic Spain and Gaul and Seleucid Syria as well as by other Greek colonies, on Sicily and in Asia Minor. Significantly, and in stark contradiction to the assertion that "there is no archaeological evidence for [Hanibal] at all," digs in Southern and Northern Italy, on Sicily, and at the site of Carthage itself, have unearthed numerous coins depicting him, and the other Punic artifacts found along with these in Italy corroborate the extent of the Carthaginian military campaign to Italy related in our sources. In the fictive scenario, furthermore, apparently we must lay the striking of these coins at our /mendacious/ historian's feet, a degree of skullguggery not remotely approached by any mythicist treatment of the history behind the literary texts of early Christianity.
Put briefly, we simply cannot make sense of the 2nd and 3rd Centuries BCE without at least the outline of the conflict found in our sources being substantially accurate. That outline ineluctably contains a role for a Carthaginian military leader of great skill and perseverence. It is this need, for which no counterpart exists in the case of Jesus, that allows confidence in the existence of a historical figure in advance of a critical assessment of the literary sources in which we learn the details of the individual's biography. In contrast to the historical picture we have in /Livy and Polybius/ and the critical work that can move on to a critical examination of the probabilities that specific events involving this figure actually unfolded in the ways that our sources relate, mainstream investigation of the historical Jesus question has elided the necessity to establish the historicity of the central figure --to adduce a clear role for which there exists otherwise a gap in our larger understanding of the era in question-- and proceeded to analyzing literary narratives on the assumption that their contents reflect an interest in relating history on the part of their authors. The rejoinder is a familiar one: Jesus, if he existed, was by the standards of his era a marginal figure, likely of peasant stock and not the sort of elite, politically significant figure for whom ancient historians had a distinct bias. This is just the fact of the matter. We wouldn't expect to have historical evidence of such a figure even approaching that for a figure like Hannibal, a great military and political force of his time, and we do not. This untoward circumstance for those who would like to make Jesus a historical figure anyway should not elicit a misplaced sympathy to the extent of giving them license to promote the data found in questionable sources betraying obvious theological motivation throughout and without external controls to the same level as those found in sober historiographies following the conventions of that genre and congruent with all that is otherwise known about the events of the era.
Let's turn to the specifics of the argument in Part 2. In particular, I will address the snide parentheticals that purport to illustrate how the mythicist hypothesis is the product of a tendentious hyper-skepticism based on faulty reasoning, or worse, on an intellectually dishonest treatment of the question. This will necessitate a discussion of the nature of the differences between the literary sources concerned as well as an investigation of the norms of ancient historiography. Finally, and this may in the end require a third post, I will address the significance of all this to the state of NT Scholarship as regards mythicist theories and the mainstream Historical Jesus industry.
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