Ive always thought of the bible as strictly stories passing on metaphors, like fairy tales or parables. It was even written and edited for years just like grimms took oral folklore and put it to written word. Some people claim jesus was real, but is there any basis to this? I’m not religious but I understand the moral value of a book of wise parables that can be passed down in story, like mythology even. I dont understand trying to make it literal about real people when it seems like wise metaphors.
This is a VERY common question around these parts and /r/AskHistorians has a really great FAQ on the historicity of Jesus Christ.
u/Dinocrocodile beat me to my first point, but you might also want to check out r/AcademicBiblical where this question comes up regularly (specifically https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical/wiki/historicaljesus).
I think I would be remiss not to mention one of the best books I have read on this topic: Helen Bond's The Historical Jesus: A Guide for the Perplexed (2012). She starts off with a history of the scholarship on the topic, which is useful for understanding the developments in the past few hundred years on the topic. Broadly speaking, for most of the past two thousand years no-one really questioned his existence, or the supernatural elements associated with him, from the 1700s the supernatural elements came under increasing scepticism and after that questions about his very existence.
Regarding the details of your question, yes there is a basis for the claim that Jesus was real. It is very unlikely that a group of people had a body of wisdom metaphors and then created a historical character to attach them to, though it is possible that that is what happened. It is easy to approach the Bible today with scepticism over the supernatural elements and so assume that there is no historical truth behind any of it. It is not uncommon in ancient sources to have this kind of situation. The Iliad and the Odyssey are good examples. No serious scholar thinks that the poems are true in their entirety, but most would accept that they reflect something of a true event that occurred, most likely a war between a few Bronze Age societies. We can never know much about the event itself, but we can apply the historical method to try and ascertain what is likely to be true and what is likely to be fiction. Historical Jesus scholarship is more or less the same. Scholars derive different conclusions on what we can and cannot know about Jesus but most believe that he was a real figure.