How well do the much-touted similarities of the Jesus story to other myths hold up?

[Silent3]

I ran into to this Cracked article yesterday: 6 Famous Documentaries That Were Shockingly Full of Crap

It started out by taking "Supersize Me" to task. Then "Waiting for 'Superman'". Then Bill Maher's "Religulous".

I'd hardly be shocked if Maher got a few facts wrong, but the thrust of the article's disagreement with "Religulous" was something I have to admit I've bought into over the past few years: that the Jesus story has a lot of mythical elements copied from preexisting myths.

All this "Jesus was copied from earlier religions" stuff has been going around the Internet for a while, and it will make you look awesome if you post it on a Halo message board, but none of it is true.

I'm willing to consider this, but then the author also says:

Oh, by the way, original sin is totally in the Bible, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a scholar who disagrees with the overwhelming evidence that a person (not necessarily a divine being) matching Jesus' description existed during his purported lifetime.

That you'd be "hard-pressed to find a scholar" who doesn't think Jesus is a real person isn't an argument that caries a lot of weight with me, since so many of those supposed scholars are dedicated Christians who tout some fairly unimpressive evidence.

I don't have a strong opinion myself about whether Jesus is mythologized history or historicized mythology. There's more than enough bullshit to go around either way. No one comes close, of course, to meeting the burden of evidence that Jesus is both real and divine and actually performed miracles and rose from the dead.

I should be willing to give up bad arguments, however, and if the alleged similarities between Jesus and Horus and Mithras, etc., don't hold up as well as have been thinking they do, so be it.

What say my fellow atheists on this matter?