Please give me so-called "proof" of Jesus or God.

More like 25 years (early 30s to late 50s, which is when the earliest of Paul's letters were written).

It might help to distinguish between a single person about whom traditions accrete, and a true composite. Lincoln is a single historical figure, to whom some legendary material has been attributed by later tradition. The same is likely true of Jesus. He is sufficiently well anchored historically that we're essentially talking about a single person, but there's a big enough gap between his life and the surviving reports (much larger than with Lincoln, of course) that it's inevitable that the traditions associated with him would change and grow.

Do you mean Biblical book or the source of the claim? In any case, your statement was about the first book in the New Testament, and it was wrong. There's no significant uncertainty about the dating of the earliest of Paul's epistles (unless one of the undated books is earlier, which is possible but unlikely). Are you sure this wasn't the time to the first gospel account? It would fit much better.

Having bothered to look in a book or two, I now see that the earliest letter of Paul (probably I Thess) is usually dated to around 51 AD, not the late 50s as I previously stated. Some would put it a few years later, in the mid 50s. Jesus died around 30 AD (give or take a few years), so the earliest book in the NT was written around 20 years after Jesus' death.

AD = Anno Domini = "year of our lord". It was supposed to be dated from Jesus' birth (but it's probably off by a few years).

We also know from Paul that he had met Jesus' brothers (and that he was not on the best of terms with them).

No, historians use Paul as evidence for the existence of Jesus. If you want to dispute them, you'll have to engage their arguments, which your comments here do not begin to do. There is much debate among poorly informed people on the Internet, and in the not insignificant crackpot community. There's virtually no debate among scholars, whatever their religious persuasion.

Doherty is part of the crackpot community I mentioned. If you want to understand evolution, don't read creationist web sites. If you want to understand New Testament/early church scholarship, don't read Doherty.Paul quite clearly believed that Jesus had a physical, human existence -- in particular, that he was descended from David. Or take the brothers of Jesus. Paul refers to them several times, and talks about having met them. They were clearly important figures in the early church, and figures that Paul didn't get along with too well. He talks about them as Jesus' brothers, Mark talks about them as Jesus' (physical) brothers, and Josephus does the same. The obvious conclusion is that they were the brothers of Jesus. It's going to take an awfully long time if the one doing the educating knows less about the facts than the believer.

No one thinks Acts was written by Paul (it was written by the same author as the gospel of Luke). Of the epistles attributed to Paul, Hebrews is obviously not Pauline, the pastorals (I & II Timothy, Titus)are unlikely to have been written by Paul, and Colossians and Ephesians are debatable (and debated). II Thessalonians is also disputed, but I don't remember how the evidence stacks up -- it isn't interesting enough to worry about. Romans, I&II Corinthians, I Thess and Galatians (and I think Philemon) are essentially undisputed. Most are simply ignorant. Yes, I'd classify the others as crackpots. Not in the foaming at the mouth sense, but in the sense that they have adopted a position for reasons other than the available evidence. In this sense, for example, Fred Hoyle held several crackpot ideas. That didn't keep him from being a brilliant and inventive scientific thinker. In order to support a mythicist position, however, you have to adopt highly strained readings of what very early material is available, including the synoptic gospels, Paul and Hebrews. In addition, the early church left records not only of their official version, but of their controversies with other positions. The shift from a nonphysical to a historical Jesus, taking place within a single Christian community, would have produced tremendous theological controversy, and yet we find no trace of that contoversy (except by highly strained readings of polemic directed against Docetists). That's a completely different kind of issue. Billions of people have lived and died without having fulfilled prophecies. In fact, the argument goes the other way: some of the gospel-writers' attempts to portray Jesus as fulfilling prophecies are quite strained, and suggest that they were trying to force a fit between the awkward facts known about Jesus (e.g. that he was from Nazareth) and the prophecies they were deploying. Creating a mythical figure to match prophecy is easy; getting a historical figure to do so is harder.

The shorter reference in Josephus (the one about the death of James, which mentions in passing that he was the brother of Jesus) is probably not an interpolation.

I've been away from the site for a long time and I'm not going to try to catch up on this thread, but I have seen a couple of recent replies. No, my claim that Doherty's views are crackpot is not ad hominem. An ad hominem argument would be that you should ignore his views because he's a bad person. If anything, my statement was an argument from authority: I was pointing out that his views are far outside the scholarly consensus at numerous points. You don't have to believe scholars, of course, but I did think it useful for people to know where Doherty stands in relation to them. (And it is an exaggeration to say that Doherty has a lot of educational credentials: as far as I know, he has only an undergraduate degree in a tangentially related field. Any scholar in the field has far better credentials.)

The event in question (the death of James) was in 62 CE, at which time Josephus was ~25 years old and living in Jerusalem. The phrase used by Josephus is "the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James". Where does that occur in the gospels? (Also, it's a bit difficult to suggest that Josephus copied the phrase from the gospels while also suggesting that the gospels weren't written until after Josephus' death.)

The full phrase is "ton adelphon Iesou tou legomenou Christou, Iakobos onoma autoi", which is exactly what I provided a translation for. This is not the way James is normally referred to in Christian texts (where is the kind of puffery that we see in the interpolated text in Josephus). "ho legomenos Christos" is not a distinctive Christian way of referring to Jesus -- in fact it's unusual in Christian texts -- but it is such a tiny fragment of vanilla Greek that it hardly means anything anyway. Josephus uses the identical construction elsewhere in the same work, e.g. Ant. 12, 125, "Antiochus... who by the Greeks was called The God", and Ant. 13, 370, "Lathyrus sent for his fourth brother Demetrius, who was call Eucerus".