THE QUESTION:

Did Jesus Exist?

THE RELIGION GUY'S ANSWER:

Yes.

It would be the ultimate blow to the Christian religion if Jesus, and with him the entirety of the New Testament, is totally fictional.

However, the strong consensus among historians, including non-Christians and skeptics, is that, yes. Jesus was an actual person of the 1st Century (Anno Domini!!). Yet an Ipsos poll for the Episcopal Church, released last month, showed only 76% of Americans "believe in the historical existence" of Jesus, with 89% of self-identified Christians, 43% for adherents of other religions and 38% among the non-religious.

Among scholars, across the years certain "mythicists" have contended that he never existed.

University of North Carolina Professor Bart Ehrman, author of "Did Jesus Exist?" (2012) and rather skeptical himself, knows of only one such thinker among thousands of scholars with Ph.D. degrees who are working in the New Testament field. He's Robert Price, a onetime Baptist minister, member of the radical "Jesus Seminar," and author of "The Historical Bejeezus" who teaches at Johnnie Coleman Theological Seminary, a "New Thought" school.

Other mythicists have included Frank Zindler, a science educator, Jesus Seminar participant, and an editor with American Atheists. In 1970, Doubleday published an eccentric book by Britain's John M. Allegro, who thought there never was a Jesus and Christianity originated as a drug cult. John Remsburg, a 19th Century superintendent of public instruction for Kansas, backed mythicism by listing 42 ancient authors never wrote about Jesus. (A newsman like The Guy would figure that's what you'd expect with an itinerant teacher executed as a criminal in a backwater of the Roman Empire.)

But Remsburg raised an interesting question. Let's say for the sake of argument we totally exclude the New Testament as evidence (which historians would never do in judging the existence of other figures from ancient times). Do we have any other relevant documentation?

Were Paul, and Jesus himself, mistaken about when Second Coming would occur?

NORMAN’S QUESTION (summarized and paraphrased):

The New Testament letter of 1st Thessalonians regards the coming of the Kingdom as imminent. But don’t 2nd Thessalonians and later New Testament letters indicate the church was coming to terms with the fact that Paul (and Jesus himself) were mistaken about this?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

Experts say the first of the two letters Paul, Silvanus and Timothy sent to friends in the Greek city of Thessalonika was the earliest New Testament book to be written, dated only a couple decades after Jesus’ crucifixion.

Both that letter and 2nd Thessalonians (which some few think might actually have been written before 1st Thessalonians) demonstrate that from the very beginning Christians looked forward to the return of Jesus as the culmination of history. After 20 centuries, expectation of the “Second Coming” or “Second Advent” or “Parousia” (Greek for “presence”) remains a central belief.

The Religion Guy consulted numerous resources on this complex terrain and relies especially on the late F.F. Bruce of England’s University of Manchester, a clear thinker and writer and, significantly, a major evangelical Protestant scholar. That movement has focused muich attention on the End Times for a century and more. Bruce wrote a commentary on the two Thessalonian letters, and treated related material in the Gospels in his classic “Hard Sayings of Jesus” (1983).

Norman has a point because of one pronoun in 1 Thessalonians 4:15: “We who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, shall not precede those who have fallen asleep” (that is, have died).

Though the three letter-writers did not expressly say so, Bruce wrote, their first person plural pronoun “we” indicates that in the first blush of newborn faith -- yes -- they thought they and their contemporaries might well still be alive when Jesus returned.