I don't think there's any serious historian who doubts the existence of Jesus .... We have more evidence for Jesus than we have for almost anybody from his time period.

Prof Bart Ehrman, University of North Carolina

we can no more reject Jesus' existence than we can reject the existence of a mass of pagan personages whose reality as historical figures is never questioned. ..... In recent years, 'no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non historicity of Jesus' or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary."

The late Michael Grant, eminent historian of the Roman Empire

Jesus did exist; and we know more about him than about almost any Palestinian Jew before 70 C.E."

Prof James Charlesworth, Princeton Theological Seminary

Biblical scholars and classical historians now regard it [the theory that Jesus didn't exist] as effectively refuted."

Robert Van Voorst, Western Theological Seminary

The historical evidence for Jesus himself is extraordinarily good. .... From time to time people try to suggest that Jesus of Nazareth never existed, but virtually all historians of whatever background now agree that he did"

NT Wright

Historicity News: Changing Tides

Richard Carrier... holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University in ancient history, specializing in the intellectual history of Greece and Rome, particularly ancient philosophy, religion, and science, with emphasis on the origins of Christianity and the use and progress of science under the Roman empire... His latest book is Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus. He is currently working on his next books, On the Historicity of Jesus Christ, The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire, and Science Education in the Early Roman Empire.

Oct 23, 2012

... The biggest news is that the renowned biblical historian and New Testament expert Thomas Brodie (author of The Birthing of the New Testament [2004] and Director of the Dominican Biblical Centre,in affiliation with the University of Limerick, Ireland) has just come out as a Jesus mythicist. He has a new book that explicitly argues that Jesus never historically existed: Thomas Brodie, Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus: A Memoir of a Discovery (published by the respected academic press Sheffield-Phoenix). This is a huge development. His conclusion: “it is already possible and necessary to draw a conclusion: it is that, bluntly, Jesus did not exist as a historical individual.” ...

At the same time, Philip Davies, Emeritus Professor of Biblical Studies at the University of Sheffield, England, published an article with the online journal The Bible and Interpretation, entitled “Did Jesus Exist?"... Davies affirms that he believes in the historicity of Jesus. But he is alarmed by... implied threats against the professions of anyone who would dare question the historicity of Jesus, ... and then concludes:

I don’t think, however, that in another 20 years there will be a consensus that Jesus did not exist, or even possibly didn’t exist, but a recognition that his existence is not entirely certain would nudge Jesus scholarship towards academic respectability.

...He acknowledges that in fact the evidence for historicity is rather weak and extremely problematic, and not at all cut-and-dried, and in no way warrants the kind of rhetoric coming from the likes of Ehrman. He says, in fact, that admitting it’s possible Jesus didn’t exist is the only way the field can maintain academic respectability.

This is almost as huge a development, as Philip Davies is a renowned scholar and (now emeritus) professor specializing in Judaism and the Dead Sea Scrolls (author of Behind the Essenes: History and Ideology in the Dead Sea Scrolls [1987] and Scribes and Schools: The Canonization of the Hebrew Scriptures [1998]). It is a major turn of events for someone like him to admit that doubting the historicity of Jesus is respectable...

Combine this with Brodie’s defection to mythicism, alongside Thompson’s, and (like Thompson’s) the publicly professed “historicity agnosticism” of Arthur Droge, professor of early Christianity at UCSD, and Kurt Noll, associate professor of religion at Brandon University, and Ehrman’s argument that only amateurs and outsiders take the Jesus Myth theory seriously is now in the dust.

There is still, certainly, a litany of crank and amateur mythicist nonsense. But there is also a serious case to be made, by serious and well-qualified scholars. And they need to be paid attention to, not dismissed and mistreated, their arguments straw manned or ignored.