Obviously Jesus the man existed. But even if he had not existed, it is obvious that the pharisees (rabbis) were friggen crazy, generally hateful and vicious, were making, like modern social justice warriors, a power grab through claims of superior holiness, trying to out holy the traditional hereditary priesthood, and leading their people to self destruction, thus inevitably someone claiming to be a prophet of God would have arisen to call them out, and would have been executed for his troubles. Also inevitable that that prophet, if not of the line of Aaron, would claim to be of the line of David. The self destructiveness of today's Jews is a faint echo of the destructiveness and self destructiveness of the rabbis at that time, who got them enslaved and exiled, and their endless legalistic interpretation and re-interpretation and re-re-interpretation of the Jewish law is what got them into trouble in the first place. If Jews had stuck with the hereditary priesthood ordained by Moses, they would not have gotten into all this trouble, nor caused all the trouble that they have caused for other peoples. The Rabbis got their people killed, and those that were not killed were enslaved and/or exiled, but the rabbis got what they really wanted. They got power and the hereditary priesthood lost power, at the cost of destroying Jerusalem. So of course a prophet must have existed complaining about this crap, and of course his life and words would have somewhat resembled the life attributed to Jesus, in that he would criticize the hypocrisy and legalism of the religious establishment, in particular and especially the hypocrisy and legalism of the pharisees, and would have died of it.