The history of Christianity is well understood in Academic circles. The Christian church is one of the few organizations that never mentions it's factual history and origins. Writing history was a big hobby back then, there's a lot of it and we know for example, what Pilate ate for lunch (flatbread, figs, dates, honey) but there is absolutely no mention of Christ in any recorded history from the era which is abundant. You'd think a guy running around the middle easy performing miraculous and impossible deeds would be written up at least once somewhere.

What is mentioned is in 175 AD when the Persians retreated Palatine half the people there wanted a return the temple-state and recycled mythology from the Torah, Egypt, Greek and Roman mythology by writing a bunch of stores we today call "the gospels" from 175 and for roughly 150 years. Note the road Christ allegedly traveled down didn' exist until 300 AD. The Christ myth had existed in 13 prior cultures who all had similar properties: virgin birth, helped the sick and poor, died and were resurrected 3 days later etc; Mithra, Horus, and many others - this is the one part of that silly Zeitgeist movie that is actually correct - the rest is nonsense). At the council of Nicaea a subset of all these gospels was codified into the New Testament. Omitted were the gospel of Judas, the "dead sea scrolls" and the Q document (now lost).

This is why the great schools of Rome and Greece were sacked during the 1000 year Christian rule of Europe we call the "Dark Ages", and all history prior to Christianity was destroyed (The Arab world had backups of most of it at the worlds oldest surviving university in Timbuktu). The sole remnant is the 300AD depiction of Christ on the underside of St Peter's basilica that show the Christ figure in a horse drawn chariot holding thunderbolts - it's actually Jupiter (who name we invoke when we say "By Jove!") recycled into a Christ figure that early Christians could not bear to destroy. It is the sole surviving example and known as the "transitional Christ" (above) as the mythos morphed from prehistoric to modern imagery of the Christ figure. Constantine and Nicosia turned the Christ myth into the Jesus cult it is today.

Funny thing about academic theologians - they become atheists. once they figure out it was ll made up, we know why who, how, when and where. A more cynical view would have it that a mythology made up by middle eastern bronze age savages to explain the rain should not affect 21st century North American bus schedules any more than Canadians should be detained because they angered the spirits of a mountain thus causing an earthquake in June 2015.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/canadians-who-allegedly-posed-naked-on-mount-kinabalu-barred-from-leaving-malaysia-1.3104221

This book is good:

http://www.amazon.com/Who-Wrote-New-Testament-Christian/dp/0060655186

as is this documentary"

https://archive.org/details/WhoWroteBible

This book is interesting, it's a historial ficion similar to Dan Browns works, but predates them. The fuamental idea is the heo uncovered evidence the Roman empire created the Jesuscult as a way of presrving it's power. It's mostly archoloigcal and the authir claims it's 50% true but will not say whihc half. I thight it was more compelling than Brown's stuff whihc I did enjoy.

http://www.amazon.com/Sign-Cross-Chris-Kuzneski/dp/0515142115

This book is older and claims Horus and Jesus were one in the same. Academics point out so were 12 other rioer dieties.

http://www.amazon.com/Christ-Egypt-The-Horus-Jesus-Connection/dp/0979963117

Wikipedia has a few pages on "the historical Christ". It is now long winded and points to one work by Tacitus that claimed first hand knowledge. Given the Shroud of Turin carbon dates to around 1300 and is a forgery, what do you think the odds are the sole piece of evidence of the existence of historical Jesus is actually genuine?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_14_dating_of_the_Shroud_of_Turin

The current Wiki article makes the case Jesus exited but is more opinion than fact and of course relies almost entirely on the bible as "proof" (thus Spider Man is real because Spider Man comics says so).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Jesus https://web.archive.org/web/20050416153231/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_and_textual_evidence

These pages chgeover time, archive.org shows the revisionism.