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?