It's hard to say.
Some scholars think that Jesus never existed and is just a compilation of earlier mythic figures. Others say that he did exist, but the stories we have about him are a compilation of historical memory mixed with other previous mythic ideas. Still others say he lived and everything said about him is true.
I personally feel that prof. Robert M. Price is right in saying that there are too many similarities between the Christian narrative and earlier mythic narratives to think that the Christian stories are 'only' historical memory. Tom Harpur has recently provided even more evidence about the relationship between Christ and the Egyptian god Horus. This can be seen on either of their websites, or in their published works.
Any particular hermeneutic has to be taken as provisional, but I feel that there is little reason to believe that the major premises about a historical Jesus have any basis in reality. To me, it was probably just a lie that a minor cult thought up and promoted for political reasons after they read Euripides' "Bacchae" and other older pagan and Hebrew texts.
On the other hand, I don't think there is any way to prove the case, one way or another. For me, agnosticism comes in as a restraint from becoming a zealot, even though it really seems to you that your point of view is likely to be the case. That's what I meant when I said in one of the postings that you could just as easily adopt a supernatural understanding to an event as you could a natural one. That doesn't mean I do (I'm a practical atheist, while being a logical agnostic - although you could just as easily posit a god without thinking it interferes in any way in natural events) Take care; John |