If Jesus is Alive, Why do we Act as if he Never Lived?

"THE HERMENEUTIC OF SUSPICION HAS BEEN SAFELY APPLIED TO THE HISTORY OF JESUS BUT NOT TO THE HISTORY OF THE HISTORIANS"  -  Tom Oden

Bart Ehrman has been celebrated by atheists for being a New Testament biblical scholar who ended up losing his faith.  Ehrman is a prolific writer who presents many challenges to Christians from the corruption of the New Testament manuscripts to presenting contradictions within the Bible.  Anyone whose been in or around the church knows that Christians often wound or shoot their own.  But now that Ehrman's new book, "Did Jesus Exist?" came out confirming that Jesus was really a historical flesh and blood person, the mythicist atheists are furious at him.  Ehrman is scorned, ridiculed, and mocked by some in the atheist community because he confirmed the historical Jesus rather than destroying him.  Since some of these atheist scholars speak about objectivity and nuetrality, one wonders why the scathing remarks aimed at Ehrman?

The sad truth is there is very little written by biblical scholars when it comes to those who believe that Jesus never really existed or lived?  Many Christian scholars simply ignore or don't even think the mythicists are worth responding to.  Probably the best scholarly work to date dealing with some of these issues is "The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliablility of the Synoptic Tradition" by Paul Rhodes Eddy and Gregory Boyd.  An indepth analysis of mythicists arguments on the internet and detailed responses to them are given by James Patrick Holding and company in "Shattering the Christ Myth."  It might be surprising to some that there is a huge amount of books out there contending that Jesus never lived and he is a legend that follows other pagan myths to old hero legends.  Of course the mythicists love to make arguments from silence, present similarities without noting the differences, and often present other historical legends or myths that are later than the Jesus story rather than prior to it.

At the end of the day, however one wants to deal with the radical skepticism of the mythicists, the more troubling issue for me are the countless numerous Jesus followers today who say that Jesus is mystically real and alive yet live like he never existed at all.  For a growing number of people who have not even read the Bible, when people look at your life, what will it tell them of the Bible you have supposedly read and are supposed to be following?