WAS JESUS A REAL PERSON? According to Tom Harpur in The Pagan Christ (not listed by Amazon), the answer is no. See this Toronto Star review:

Tom Harpur would reject, outright, the philosophy behind the new Mel Gibson movie The Passion Of The Christ.

Gibson, the conservative Catholic movie director portrays the life of Christ literally from scripture and reads the Gospel narrative as actual history.

Harpur would find that indefensible.

He would also differ from many modern theologians such as Jesus Seminar members John Spong and Marcus Borg, who believe there was an actual Jesus of history.

[...]

Harpur, formerly the religion editor of the Toronto Star and author of many books on faith subjects, believes that originally there was one primal, central myth that emerged "undoubtedly" in Egypt. All the other ancient sacred stories flow from there.

[...]

Three virtually unknown authorities used by Harpur are Godfrey Higgins (1771-1834), an early English mythologist who, through groundbreaking studies of ancient writings, sought freedom from the exclusivism and dogmatism of Christianity; Gerald Massey (1828-1907), an American who studied Egyptian mythology and there discovered antecedents to images and themes appearing in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament; and Alvin Boyd Kuhn (1880-1963), another American, who pursued extensive academic research into the origins of religious symbols and meanings. His work, though esoteric to untrained eyes, convinced Harpur of the validity of Egyptian sources for much of what appears in the Christian scriptures.

Basing his ideas on these men, Harpur goes to great lengths to promote Horus (the son of Isis or Osiris) transforming him into Jesus, the central figure of Christianity. Horus, who receives but a paragraph of mention in the respected New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology (1968), becomes, for Harpur, the metaphorical and allegorical truth behind the person of Jesus.

Because of his research into ancient myth, Harpur feels he has undergone a spiritual re-awakening that has revolutionized his Christian faith. Because of its links to the great archetypal themes of primal and classic spirituality, the Bible has assumed new potency and vitality for him. Harpur believes he now possesses an awareness of the cosmic Christ he has so long sought.

Now far be it from me to dispute with Harpur about whether he's found an awareness of the cosmic Christ. But his ideas about the earthly Jesus aren't very persuasive and his enthusiastic use of nineteenth century sources to make his case doesn't enhance its credibility. The evidence for Jesus as an actual person who walked the earth in the early first century C.E. is very solid: not just the four Gospels, written within a generation or two of his lifetime, but also the letters of Paul and references in Josephus (one of which is, granted, problematic, but the other isn't) and Tacitus. I know of no living specialist in the historical Jesus who thinks Jesus didn't exist at all. Whether we can know much about what Jesus did or taught is quite another matter and I myself am pretty skeptical.

You can find Tom Harpur's website here. He seems to be really into spirituality, which is fine, but if he's going to talk about historical matters he needs to pay some attention to what historical-Jesus specialists have done in the last century and not try to reinvent the wheel.