The reality is that the majority of people simply didn't even know about the story
Any evidence for this?
- it was not popularised until much later.
Which is why the emperor knew about it roughly 30 years after Jesus was executed.
Christianity has never exceeded about a third of the population.
Of what? The world? And what does this matter? Jews were a tiny minority, yet their actions resulted in three military campaigns by the Roman empire alone in an interval of about a century.
The Jews and other regional faiths at the time all rejected the Jesus story
The Jews were the ones telling the story. The word "Christian" was not adopted by Christians but applied to them, as evidenced not only by its almost complete absence in our texts (Acts being an exception) but its linguistic derivation. Also, there were no "regional faiths", as outside of Judaism precious few religious traditions adhered to any faith (I wrote about this over three posts which you wrote off, but before you go asking for evidence that it is ridiculous to speak of "regional faiths" you may wish to actually read these, as I'll simply refer you to them). The author of Luke/Acts had a patron. The entirety of the NT was written in Greek despite the clear indications of an original Aramaic (and most likely oral, though some argue there existed written) transmission of the Jesus tradition. The first Jew we know of from a first person account is Paul, the first Christian we know of from any text. Fragments of manuscripts and fragments quoted by others attest to e.g., Jewish Christianity as in e.g., the Ebionites. By the beginning of the 2nd Century, Christian practice had influenced paganism enough to see the re-creation of Mithra in the form of a Romanist, mystery cult savior deity. By the 4th century, Christian texts were produced so frequently that scribes developed a shorthand in order to render easier the production of Christian texts.
As an argument for historicity, claiming that nobody ever challenged it is about as bad an argument as you could possibly think up.
That's not the argument. The argument is that we have many challenges from ancient texts. In fact, the incredibly numerous and lengthy quotes by the so-called "church fathers" and "heresy hunters" of "gnostic" texts were regarded as obviously biased because they were so bizarre it was clear the authors were distorting the beliefs of their rivals. That ended with the Nag Hammadi finds. It turned out that the Christian polemists had described and quoted their rivals far more accurately than anybody believed until we had the primary sources to compare.
So, when one finds
extensive evidence not only of non-Christian attacks on Christianity (not to mention attacks within Christianities), but also even more extensive defenses against the charges, criticisms, and derisive opinions of non-Christians from Paul onwards, and instead of any suggestion that anybody thought Jesus non-historical we find that ardent critics of Christianity clearly think him historical, we have reason to ask whether anybody questioned Jesus' historicity the way they did e.g., Homer.
Anyone with any knowledge of early Christianity would know that it was not a popular belief until many centuries later.
Anybody with knowledge of antiquity, early Christianity, and Greco-Roman religious practice after the first century would know that the influence of Christianity wasn't limited to those who espoused Christian beliefs. It created contenders in the form of pagan cults and doctrines that didn't exist.
Legion, saying "Oh, unless you can prove that lots of credible people doubted it at the time - it must be true?"
I don't recall saying that, and certainly don't believe it. I look at evidence and what we can conclude. Given the criticisms and responses to them we possess, the fact that there is no "Jesus never lived" criticism until the 18th century is evidence. The fact that nobody generally thought of deities as historical and certainly didn't locate them in a specific place/time gives us further reason to conclude that critics of Christianity didn't imagine that a tradition so clearly similar to those told about historical persons from Pythagoras and Alexander the Great to Augustus, son of god, not only gives us reason to think there were no such critics but also one reason why: it takes a modern mind to look at the gospels and connect them with the kind of mythic deity largely created by Western "scholars" in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Is just an appeal to popularity, not a logical rebuttal.
I'm sure you are familiar with the (true) assertion that "if x, then y" is not logically equivalent with "if not x, then not y". Are you aware that it is
mathematically proven that granted "if x, then y" is true, then "if not x then not y" necessarily more likely?
