I think part of the problem is that a "massive dogmatic bias" isn't needed to arrive at a historical Jesus in conventional historic scholarship. To plenty of s

I think part of the problem is that a "massive dogmatic bias" isn't needed to arrive at a historical Jesus in conventional historic scholarship. To plenty of scholars, a "historic X" just means that X was recorded in history, and there's a set of techniques to perform critical reading of written history that is used to reject the incredible. It's fair to say that Biblical history is especially rich in designing such criteria however ... As I suspect most engineers do I do see values in systematic, critical approaches to dealing with human-made documents and artifacts, but have a hard time feeling certain without direct physical evidence. By implication this makes a lot of popularly-held history unknowable to me however (as in, the historicity of many people other than Jesus is believed without direct physical evidence as well, based on "records from the time show ...").