FYI, this seemed decent:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_myth_theory
The preponderance of the evidence would seem to be that he really did exist.
The preponderance of the evidence would seem to be that he really did exist.
Bible scholars have a consensus that this is the case, although whether they are doing any actual scholarship with regard to the issue is questionable. Atheists by and large do not become Bible scholars, and the mind-killing effects of religion mean that theists tend to do notably poor scholarship in this particular area.
However when a rationalist tries to drill down to the actual evidence you find that nothing is there, apart from Bible scholars reading the Bible and saying "this Paul guy seems legit, I don't think he'd have made that up".
To break up the awkward silence at the start of a recent Overcoming Bias meetup, I asked everyone present to tell their rationalist origin story - a key event or fact that played a role in their first beginning to aspire to rationality. This worked surprisingly well (and I would recommend it for future meetups).
I think I've already told enough of my own origin story on Overcoming Bias: how I was digging in my parents' yard as a kid and found a tarnished silver amulet inscribed with Bayes's Theorem, and how I wore it to bed that night and dreamed of a woman in white, holding an ancient leather-bound book called Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (eds. D. Kahneman, P. Slovic, and A. Tversky, 1982)... but there's no need to go into that again.
So, seriously... how did you originally go down that road?
Added: For some odd reason, many of the commenters here seem to have had a single experience in common - namely, at some point, encountering Overcoming Bias... But I'm especially interested in what it takes to get the transition started - crossing the first divide. This would be very valuable knowledge if it can be generalized. If that did happen at OB, please try to specify what was the crucial "Aha!" insight (down to the specific post if possible).