Do you think jesus christ existed

[Aractus]

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*Some people hate Wikipedia almost as much as the Bible, but it's not a bad place to start. The quote is 10 years old, and I haven't yet tracked down what constitutes "nearly all" modern scholars in this case.

As Morgan pointed out, not all scholars agree on the statement above. Even if there were consensus on only those two points (baptism and crucifixion), that still leaves a world of doubt about what might have happened before and after crucifixion -- kinda the important bits.

As someone elsewhere on the web put it: you don't need to know whether or not L. Ron Hubbard existed to conclude that Scientology is a load of crap. (My tolerance only goes so far.)

I think the possibility of a historical man who who lived and was crucified (most likely framed) is certainly there. The possibility of his existence and any future evidence that he merely existed does not change my conviction as an atheist. That would take much more.

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Saying "not all scholars agree on"... and then listing one of the basic accepted historical facts, is akin to saying that not all historians believe the basic accepted historical facts of the Holocaust.

The basic facts accepted by the overwhelming majority of New Testament scholars/theologians/historians that I can think of off the top of my head are:

1. Jesus was baptized by John,
2. Jesus called disciples,
3. Jesus died by crucifixion.

There are others too. Disputing these facts which are so overwhelming supported requires you to produce evidence to support the theory, and barely anyone produces any evidence other than "the Gospels don't count as evidence" etc, which is rubbish. Even bad quality evidence is still evidence, and even scholars who think the Gospels are bad quality evidence still believe that those three facts can be reliably derived from them.