http://www.herbertwarmstrong.com/jesus_will_not_return.htm
This is not a debate question.
All I want to know is: Did the man who the world refers to as Jesus Christ exist.
I’m not asking if he was the son of God. I’m not asking if he performed miricles. I’m not asking what your faith is.
All I want to know is, was there actually a man named Jesus, the same man refered to in the Christian Bible. Whether he actually was the son of God and so on is not what I’m asking. Those are debate questions. I just to know if the man name Jesus actually lived at all. Is there any proof? Any evidence?
Most likely.
Hey, it will be the general consensus in the end.
Unca Cecil thinks so.
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_275.html
I’m his favorite nephew.
No. Really! 
There are a heck of a lot of people who did exist and who left much less of a mark.
In the early years of the Common Era there were any number of mystic/brigands coming in from the wilderness to try to throw the Romans out of Israel and re-establish the kingdom of David. Most of them were executed once they got caught or annoyed the authorities enough. If one named Yeshua was among the throng, his career could easily have been missed in the crowd, except for his immediate followers (and one guy who was really good with Public Relations but who had never had the opportunity to hear Yeshua preach).
See the works of G.A. Wells – The Jesus of the Early Cristians, The Historical Evidence for Jesus and – significantly Did Jesus Exist?. (He wrote other books,m but they mostly rehash arguments from these first three.) As someone once said, you can’t prove a negative, which Wells freely admits, but he makes the best possible case for his position, and it’s an intriguing one. The bottom line is that it is certainly ppossible to imagine a set of cicumstances in which the gospels evolved without a historic Jesus behind them, and it’s not at allarfetched. It explains certain anomalies pretty well. Bt, of coure, it’s not by any means proved or unassailable.
This general issue has been kicked around a few times, before. You might want to check out the following links (some of them contentious, some polite) regarding various perspectives:
Is Jesus in secular history? 2002-05-09
Jesus’ Real Name 2002-04-18
Yoshe bin Pantera = Jesus? 2002-03-21
Can we separate The Christ of Faith from the Historical Jesus? 2001-11-20
Jesus: UL? 2001-10-27 (interesting link–challenged, of course–at http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?postid=1759488#post1759488 )
Was Jesus Real, or not? 2001-09-08
Jesus Christ v Julis Caesar 2000-09-08