Did Jesus exist as a real historical figure?

Question: Jesus is supposed to have been a Palestinian Jew in the 1st century (roughly 4 BC to AD 30), the personage around whom the Christian church was formed. Regardless of whether he actually performed miracles or whether he actually claimed to be the Son of God, did such a Jesus at least walk the earth as a real historical figure?

While most credential historians may doubt Jesus performed miracles, literally over 99.9% of them (and 100% with professorships) believe Jesus existed. See examples of experts commenting on the status in their field:

• Paul Maier (Ancient history professor at Western Michigan): “Open nearly any text in ancient history of Western civilization used widely in colleges and universities today, and you will find a generally sympathetic, if compressed, version of Jesus' life, which ends with some variation of the statement that he was crucified by Pontius Pilate and died as a result. No ranking historian anywhere in the world shares the ultimate criticism voiced by German philosopher Bruno Bauer in the last century, that Jesus was a myth, that he never lived in fact.” [“Christianity Today”, XIX (1975): 63.]
• Bart Ehrman (Outspoken critic of Christianity, NT & religion professor at UNC): “He certainly existed, as virtually every competent scholar of antiquity, Christian or non-Christian, agrees” [Forged: Writing in the Name of God (HarperOne, 2011), 256.]
• Mark Allen Powell (NT professor at Trinity Lutheran, a founding editor of the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus): “A hundred and fifty years ago a fairly well respected scholar named Bruno Bauer maintained that the historical Jesus never existed. Anyone who says that today – in the academic world at least – gets grouped with the skinheads who say there was no Holocaust and the scientific holdouts who want to believe the world is flat.” [Jesus as a Figure in History (Westminster, 1998), 168.]
• Michael Grant (Atheist professor at Edinburgh, Classicist): “To sum up, modern critical methods fail to support the Christ-myth theory. It has 'again and again been answered and annihilated by first-rank scholars'. In recent years, 'no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non historicity of Jesus' or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary.” [Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels (Simon & Schuster, 1992.] (Approvingly citing Otto Betz)
• Craig Evans (NT professor at Asbury; Founder of Dead Sea Scrolls Inst.): “No serious historian of any religious or nonreligious stripe doubts that Jesus of Nazareth really lived in the first century and was executed under the authority of Pontius Pilate, the governor of Judea and Samaria. Though this may be common knowledge among scholars, the public may well not be aware of this.” [Jesus, The Final Days eds. Evans & Wright (Westminster, 2009), 3.]
• Robert Van Voorst (NT professor at Western Theological): “The nonhistoricity [of Jesus] thesis has always been controversial… Biblical scholars and classical historians now regard it as effectively refuted.” [Jesus Outside the New Testament: An Introduction to the Ancient Evidence (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2000), 16.]
• Richard Burridge (Biblical exegesis professor at King's College, Classicist): “There are those who argue that Jesus is a figment of the Church’s imagination, that there never was a Jesus at all. I have to say that I do not know any respectable critical scholar who says that any more.” [Jesus, Now and Then (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2004), 34.]