Bart Ehrman:“These views are so extreme (Jesus didn’t exist) and so unconvincing to 99.9% of the real experts that anyone holding them is as likely to get a teaching job in an established department of religion as a 6-day creationist is likely to land on in a bona fide department of biology.”
Scholar Michael Grant says: “To sum up, modern critical methods fail to support the Christ-myth theory. It has ‘again and again been answered and annihilated by first-rank scholars.”
Richard Burridge: “I have to say that I do not know any respectable critical scholar who says that (that Jesus did not exist) anymore.”
“Jesus of Nazareth was a historical person, a claim virtually no one doubted before because of the vast and varied literary evidence we have for his existence.”-Darrell Bock & Dan Wallace (‘Dethroning Jesus.’)
“I think the evidence is just so overwhelming that Jesus existed, that it’s silly to talk about him not existing.”–Bart Ehrman (In an interview with David Barrett, ‘The Gospel According to Bart.’)
“Of course the doubt as to whether Jesus really existed is unfounded and not worth refutation.”-Rudolph Bultmann (‘Jesus and the Word.’)
“No one. No one in scholarly circles dealing with ancient Judaism and early Christianity, of any religious or non-religious persuasion holds the view that Jesus never existed. You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own truth.”
-Larry Hurtado (New Testament specialist in a comment at his blog.)
“Some skeptics have maintained that the best account of the biblical and historical evidence is the theory that Jesus never existed; that is, that Jesus’ existence is a myth (Well 1999). Such a view is controversial and not widely held even by anti-Christian thinkers.”-Michael Martin (Atheist, ‘Skeptical Perspectives on Jesus’ Resurrection.’)
“None of them [specialists in the field], to my knowledge, has any doubts that Jesus existed. …The view that Jesus existed is held by virtually every expert on the planet.” -Bart Ehrman (‘Did Jesus Exist?’)
“To doubt the historical existence of Jesus at all… was reserved for an unrestrained, tendentious criticism of modern times into which it is not worthwhile to enter in here.”-Gunther Bornkamm (‘Jesus of Nazareth.’)
“This view [that Jesus didn’t exist] is demonstrably false. It is fuelled by a regrettable form of atheist prejudice, which holds all the main primary sources, and Christian people, in contempt. …. Most of its proponents are also extraordinarily incompetent.”-Maurice Casey (‘Jesus of Nazareth.’)
“If you’re dealing with real scholars, historians that teach at the best universities in the world, they don’t have any doubt that there was a real person in the first century known as Jesus of Nazareth.”-Craig Evans (In an interview at Apologetics315.)
“Mythicism isn’t about treating historical sources in the same way across the board. It is entirely the purview of people with a vendetta against Christianity, although even in such circles there are plenty who do not find it persuasive. And it must be emphasized that it is taken no more seriously among mainstream historians than in Biblical studies.”-James F. McGrath (‘Exploring Our Matrix.’)
“Thus, since scholars have totally rejected the Jesus myth hypothesis again and again and little new information is offered, we are under no obligation to give it new consideration.” -Mike Licona (‘The God Who Wasn’t There.’)
“Nevertheless, any informed and rational investigation into it will lead the reasonable person to conclude that if this is the best that the Jesus Myth has to offer, there is little to commend the theory.” -Christopher Price (‘A Short Review of the Jesus Puzzle.’)
“Now you can argue about whether he was the Son of God or not, you can argue about the supernatural aspects of his life, but in terms of the historical character there is absolutely no evidence to the contrary and all the evidence is in the favor.”-Paul Maier (‘In the Fullness of Time.’)
“But anyone who dips into the thousands of secular monographs and journal articles on the historical Jesus will quickly discover that mythicists are regarded by 99.9% of the scholarly community as complete “outliers,” the fringe of the fringe.”-John Dickson (‘It’s Beginning to Look a lot Like Christmas… Mythicism’s in the Air.’)
“There is a reason why this view is the sole possession of an energetic bunch of fringe atheists and has never been entertained as a possibility by experienced and respected scholars working in the field of Christian Origins.”-Mike Bird (‘Yes, Jesus existed … but relax, you can still be an atheist if you want to.’)
“In the academic mind, there can be no more doubt whatsoever that Jesus existed than did Augustus and Tiberius, the emperors of his lifetime. Even if we assume for a moment that the accounts of non-biblical authors who mention him – Flavius Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny the Younger and others – had not survived, the outstanding quality of the Gospels, Paul’s letters and other New Testament writings is more than good enough for the historian.”-Carsten Peter Thiede (‘Jesus, Man or Myth?’)
“Some writers may toy with the fancy of a ‘Christ-myth,’ but they do not do so on the ground of historical evidence. The historicity of Christ is as axiomatic for an unbiased historian as the historicity of Julius Caesar. It is not historians who propagate the ‘Christ-myth’ theories.”-F. F. Bruce (‘The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?’)
“But the claim that Jesus was a figment of religious imagination and not a figure of first-century history is, quite frankly, amateur hour. It deserves to be as ignored in the public sphere as much as it is in historical circles.”-John Dickson (‘The Irreligious assault on the historicity of Jesus.’)
“This may seem silly to stress, but through the years some have denied that Jesus ever lived. The non-biblical sources put such nonsense to rest.”–Robert Stein (‘Jesus the Messiah: A Survey of the Life of Christ’)
“An extreme instance of pseudo-history of this kind is the “explanation” of the whole story of Jesus as a myth.”– Emil Brunner (‘The Mediator: A Study of the Central Doctrine of the Christian Faith.’)
“[The non-Christian references to Jesus from the first two centuries] render highly implausible any farfetched theories that even Jesus’ very existence was a Christian invention. The fact that Jesus existed, that he was crucified under Pontius Pilate (for whatever reason) and that he had a band of followers who continued to support his cause, seems to be the part of the bedrock of historical tradition. If nothing else, the non-Christian evidence can provide us with certainty on that score.” -Christopher Tuckett (‘The Cambridge Companion to Jesus.’)
“The proposition has been questioned, but the alternative explanations proposed—the theories of the “Christ myth school,” etc.—have been thoroughly discredited.” -Morton Smith (‘Jesus the Magician.’)
“These claims have long since been exposed as historical nonsense. There can be no reasonable doubt that Jesus of Nazareth lived in Palestine in the first three decades of our era, probably from 6-7 BC to 30 AD. That is a fact.” –Walter Kasper (‘Jesus the Christ.’)
“Of course, only a lunatic fringe has ever thought that Jesus did not exist at all.”-Bernard McGinn (‘Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil.’)
“If one were able to survey the members of the major learned societies dealing with antiquity, it would be difficult to find more than a handful who believe that Jesus of Nazareth did not walk the dusty roads of Palestine in the first three decades of the Common Era. Evidence for Jesus as a historical personage is incontrovertible.”-Ward Gasque (‘The Leading Religion Writer in Canada… Does He Know What He’s Talking About?’)
“It is no surprise then that there is noNew Testament scholar drawing pay from a post who doubts the existence of Jesus. I know not one. His birth, life, and death in first-century Palestine have never been subject to serious question and, in all likelihood, never will be among those who are experts in the field. The existence of Jesus is a given.”-Nicholas Perrin (‘Lost in Transmission?: What We Can Know About the Words of Jesus.’)
“Frankly, I know of no ancient historian or biblical historian who would have a twinge of doubt about the existence of a Jesus Christ – the documentary evidence is simply overwhelming.”-Graeme Clarke (Quoted in ‘Facts and friction of Easter.’)
“There’s no serious question for historians that Jesus actually lived. There’s real issues about whether he is really the way the Bible described him. There’s real issues about particular incidents in his life. But no serious ancient historian doubts that Jesus was a real person, really living in Galilee in the first century.”-Chris Forbes (In an interview: ‘Zeitgeist: Time to Discard the Christian Story?’)
“From time to time people try to suggest that Jesus of Nazareth never existed, but virtually all historians of whatever background now agree that he did, and most agree that he did and said a significant amount at least of what the four gospels say he did and said.”-N. T. Wright (‘The Resurrection Was as Shocking Then as It Is Now.’)
“The data we have are certainly adequate to confute the view that Jesus never lived, a view that no one holds in any case.” -Charles E. Carlston (In Bruce Chilton & Craig A. Evans ‘Studying the Historical Jesus.’)
“Although it is held by Marxist propaganda writers that Jesus never lived and that the Gospels are pure creations of the imagination, this is not the view of even the most radical Gospel critics.”-Bernard Ramm (‘An Evangelical Christology: Ecumenic and Historic.’)
“That he was crucified is as sure as anything historical can ever be, since both Josephus and Tacitus… agree with the Christian accounts on at least that basic fact.” (Crossan, John. ‘Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography’
Expositing Reality 