He was real but the stories of miracles were made up or exaggerated. Back then every other dude claimed to be the Messiah. Here is the thing, he was not blonde haired and blue eyed as he was a Middle Eastern Jew but here is the other thing, he was likely very charismatic, tough and a good fighter. Here is the third thing, thank goodness for Christianity as without it the world would be a giant Sharia Law shit hole.
Or maybe we'd have kept worshipping the Roman Gods and not had Dark Ages.
But you kind of skipped over my points... If Jesus was real, why isn't there a lot more consistent information on him?
It's just as plausible that he was created as a literary device by Saul of Tarsus because Saul lacked the standing to propose major reforms of Judaism.
The problem being that the stories are just that, stories. Mark wrote the bare bones, but then when someone pointed out the messiah had to have been born in Bethlehem and Jesus was supposedly from Nazareth, Luke and Matthew had to come up with convoluted stories around his birth.
Matthew's was kind of plagarism... A mad king orders the deaths of babies? Where have we heard that one before? Oh, yeah, the same thing happened with Moses. Except, of course, that Herod's life was pretty well documented, and no one else ever claimed he ordered a bunch of babies killed.
Luke's is even sillier. The new Roman governor orders a census, and requires everyone to report to their ancestral home to be counted. First the Romans didn't conduct censuses that way. Second, Jesus was born in Galilee, which was still not a Roman Province at that time, so there was no reason for my Patron Saint to go back and be counted.
But if you understand those stories as LITERARY constructs, they make sense. The Magi were shoe-horned into Matthew because they were trying to give Jesus some of that Zoroastrian Mojo.