Why is the fact that Jesus Christ existed being called into question recently?

Answer 1

It is the nature of scholars to try to understand the past and to analyse the documents and other evidence that have come down from the past. As they began to understand the origins of the books of the New Testament and unravel some of the inconsistencies they found, scholars began to ask broader questions such as whether the gospels were really based on a historical person.
They had seen that Matthew's Gospel and Luke's Gospel were largely copied from The Gospel of Mark. Further research shows that John's Gospel is based on Luke's Gospel, with some material derived direct from Mark. So, this means that the only original gospel is that of Mark. The questions then became how Mark learnt of the life of Jesus, and how reliable his information was. Most scholars say that the author was not the John Mark who was thought to have obtained his information about the life of Jesus from the disciple Peter.

Scholars began to seek explanations for the differences between the understanding of Jesus that Paul seems to provide in his epistles, and the accounts in the four gospels. Paul never seems to have really seen Jesus as a real person who lived in the recent past.

Some of the views expressed about the historicity of Jesus include:

• Harold Bloom (Jesus and Yahweh: the Names Divine) wrote that Mark invented Jesus.
• Dennis R. MacDonald (The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark) says that Mark's genre is that of the Homeric prose epic, and calls into doubt the entire gospel account.
• Robert M. Price (The Christ Myth Theory and Its Problems) says that the gospel accounts of events in the life of Jesus and of sayings attributed to him can consistently be traced back to the Old Testament and Greek mythology, with little that is credibly new in the gospels. He also says, on the usual understanding of a historical Jesus, that it is inexplicable that the epistles never quote him.
• Alvar Ellegard (Jesus One Hundred Years Before Christ) believes that Jesus could have based on the Teacher of Righteousness (cf Dead Sea Documents), and that the early disciples were Essenes.
• On the other hand, Robert Eisenman (The Dead Sea Scrolls and the First Christians) sees James as the Teacher of Righteousness.
  

Other scholars accept Jesus as a historical person, but say that he was not divine and did not intend to start a new religious movement.