Did Jesus exist?

[Aegon]

I mean, really. How could Christianity take off without a central prophet figure? What stops someone from the time saying to his followers, "No man, you're full of shit," and going to where Jesus allegedly lived and preached and saying, "See!? No Jesus! You guys are crazy!" Without Jesus, the rise of Christianity is missing a big puzzle piece. What would you put in his place to explain it all?

Who would die for a lie...........?  

Is it plato that's possibly socrates, or socrates that's possibly plato's?  I can never remember.....but, so what if he didn't exist?  How have you determined that jesus was a physical person and zues "not so much"?  Certainly couldn't have teased that differences out of the stories told about either.

I'll just go find all the ancient historians in the world and tell them to pick a new profession. So what if so many of the people of that time didn't exist? Who cares? No contemporary sources! What's the point, am I right? There's nothing in this counterargument that hasn't already been settled. You say Jesus wasn't real and people believed in a lie as time went on? That's been settled already:

"This idea has been presented in most detail by another amateur theorist in yet another self-published book: R.G. Price's Jesus - A Very Jewish Myth (2007).  Unlike "Acharya S" and, to a lesser extent Doherty, Price at least takes account of the fact that the Jesus stories and the first members of the Jesus sect are completely and fundamentally Jewish, so fantasies about Egyptian myths or Greek Middle Platonic philosophy are not going to work as points of origin for them.  According to this version of Jesus Mythicism, Jesus was an idealisation of what the Messiah was to be like who got turned into a historical figure largely by mistake and misunderstanding.

Several of the same objections to Doherty's thesis can be made about this one - if this was the case, why are there no remnants of debates with or condemnations of those who believed the earlier version and maintained there was no historical Jesus at all?  And why don't any of Christianity's enemies use the fact that the original Jesus sect didn't believe in a historical Jesus as an argument against the new version of the sect?  Did everyone just forget?

More tellingly, if the Jesus stories arose out of ideas about and expectations of the Messiah, it is very odd that Jesus doesn't fit those expectations better.  Despite Christian claims to the contrary, the first Christians had to work very hard to convince fellow Jews that Jesus was the Messiah precisely because he didn't conform to these expectations. Most importantly, there was absolutely no tradition or Messianic expectation that told of the Messiah being executed and then rising from the dead - this first appears with Christianity and has no Jewish precedent at all.  Far from evolving from established Messianic prophecies and known elements in the scripture, the first Christians had to scramble to find anything at all which looked vaguely like a "prophecy" of this unexpected and highly unMessianic event.

That the centre and climax of the story of Jesus would be based on his shameful execution and death makes no sense if it evolved out of Jewish expectations about the Messiah, since they contained nothing about any such idea.  This climax to the story only makes sense if it actually happened, and then his followers had to find totally new and largely strained and contrived "scriptures" which they then claimed "predicted" this outcome, against all previous expectation.  Price's thesis fails because Jesus' story doesn't conform to Jewish myths enough." 
-http://armariummagnus.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/did-jesus-exist-jesus-myth-theory-again.html