While of course many aspects of the Bible are a matter of faith rather than history, there's enough evidence suggesting the major players at least existed that it's questionable to call them "fictional". [/pendantic]
That's actually not true even though Christians keep repeating it.
Unless you count the Christian sources (which would kinda make the discussion useless) there's hardly any evidence for Jesus' existence apart from very few instances of mostly Roman and Greek historians mentioning his name decades after he allegedly died. Now I'll grant you that only like 1% of ancient literature is still available to us and even I don't think that the early Christians just completely made up some shit.
If that's proof for you regarding the existence of all the
major players, fine. As a historian (not specialized in Ancient history) I'm inclined to believe that a guy called Jesus or similar existed but all the other major characters might just as well be completely fictional (with very few notable exceptions who acted after he died (like Paul)).
The whole kerfuffle around him? I dunno, we're not even sure Pilate existed and you'd think the Romans were decent at keeping track of their officials.
But again, it's been quite a long time and much was lost so I'm not gonna sit here and claim he didn't exist. But coming here saying there's evidence that the major characters existed is just nonsense.
And let's not get into the Old Testament cause there are hardly any historical accounts from that time at all.
