Hello,
I, like A2, am an atheist. I think I have been--in the very least I have been sceptical--my entire life. The question he has posed is a completely valid one, and I can't seem to find any relevant or convincing arguments here that answer it.
What I want to know is how you can have so much faith in a Bronze Age superstition. Why aren't you compelled by the Icelandic Sagas to believe in Odin or Thor? About as much writing exists about Zeus, Hera, Heracles as there does about Jesus and Yahweh. So why are you so willing to put your 'faith' in what you were told by humans about a book written by humans? It seems to me it isn't 'god' you have faith in, but other human beings. Why is it so unreasonable for people like A2 and I to demand more than that? To not make decisions based on the words of others with no substantiating proof? I trust verifiable, repeatable, and visible evidence before I trust anything. Historical sources are never deemed completely reliable, but they are always ALWAYS read with that bias in mind.
As to Alexander; yes, the earliest remaining sources describing him and his campaign are hundreds of years after his lifetime. There are many disagreements in the sources about particular events (Ie, if he cut the Gordian knot or if he pulled the holding pin) but there is no doubt in scholarship that he was a real man. That he lived, and that he really did lead a campaign across the Mediterranean. I accept these basic, verifiable facts because--while the sources are not as old as we would like--there are countless accounts. None of them first hand, but they don't have to be. To substantiate his existence we only need one or two sources--separated by great geographical distance--to make an educated assumption that the person in question was real. More importantly, Alexander left behind a legacy and material evidence of his existence--the Hellenistic world was not an illusion-- that is not difficult to verify, and Macedonia did keep a record of their Kings. But it is impossible to make any solid statement of fact about the specifics of his campaign because we simply cannot verify that the testimonies of Plutarch, Quintus, Diodorus, Pliny, Arrian, Cleitarchus, Justin, Valerius, or Aelian (to name only a few) are completely factually accurate. But we aren't making that claim, are we?
The fact that theists struggle to come up with even one such account - Josephus- whose validity is HIGHLY in question, when I can name nine such accounts of Alexander makes them not even in the same arena to be compared. We can prove Alexander existed, and even if you can prove conclusively that Jesus existed, you can't prove anything else about him because the records simply don't exist. We don't claim anything extraordinary or supernatural about Alexander, but you want to claim all kinds of things about Jesus when you can't even verify he was a real man to any satisfiable degree.