Did Jesus exist?

[Cecelia]

Definitively not. If it's not the Jesus described in the Bible then it's not Jesus, and there definitely was no Jesus described in the Bible.

There's a difference between "Biblical Jesus" and "Jesus, the man whom Christianity was meant to be based upon".  Biblical Jesus did not exist.  There was no man who fed hundreds with a few loaves of fish, who walked on water, or who cast a bunch of pigs into a body of water.  There may have been a man who claimed to do these things, however.  That, we can't be sure of.  We have no idea if any of the stories had any kernels of truth in them.  That is to say, we have no idea if he was a Charlatan Faith Healer like we have today, who made it appear as if he healed people but never actually healed anybody.  

"Jesus, the man whom Christianity was meant to be based upon" is not Jesus in a meaningful sense, but experts tend to agree that such a man probably existed.  He's far from historical fact-- so it's certainly a debate worth having-- but he's also not quite a "myth' in the same way that Moses and Abraham are (and experts agree that they are myth, not historical). 

Identifying the man whom Christianity is based upon is difficult because we have little concrete information about him.  He was Crucified by Rome, and he probably had followers.  Not much information to go on at all.  Essentially he was the Harold Camping of his time.  He wouldn't really be worth looking for/into if one of the world's major religions wasn't (supposedly) based upon him.  Like Camping, he probably wouldn't be worth mentioning by most people until his followers became too numerous to ignore.