In his critique of John Carroll's The Existential Jesus (May 2007), Archbishop Jensen implies that Christian belief in Jesus as a spiritual presence can only be sustained if all gospel details, including the resurrection, are believed as factual, and that the "existential Jesus" stripped of such details "would have disappeared long ago".  
 
This seems to be rash assertion. In the first place, demanding a literal gospel reading makes us ask a couple of questions regarding the factualness of the gospel writers.  For instance, if neither Matthew, nor Mark, nor Luke, nor John, actually wrote the works attributed to them, how much hyperbole can we ascribe to the hagiographical tendencies of those who did write the gospels but never knew Jesus? How much ought the non-scholarly gospel reader be aware of a sort of competitiveness between spiritual factions and belief systems resulting in a "my god is better than your god" sort of narrative?  
 
Within the gospels, resting on the apostolic word for faith is problematic, too. How much credibility can we give to the description of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane when, by the apostles' own account in the story, they were outside the garden and fast asleep, and simply not privy to whatever he was doing and saying in there?   What is one to make of the selfless divine Jesus, who childishly swears at a fig tree because it is out of season and will not give him fruit? And who are we to suppose said, "He who is not with me is against me"? A divine being with omniscient wisdom, or a later writer with limited understanding and a conflictual psychology?
 
As for the proposition that an "existential Jesus" would not have endured in religious effectiveness, I am not so sure about that.  The Buddha has lasted longer than Jesus (since about 500 BC), with no resurrection, and no suffering beyond the normal vicissitudes of daily life.  The hagiographical account of his birth is not a prerequisite of faith, for a transformation from self-centredness to compassion and kindness.  Not that I am a Buddhist!  However, if one is called to faith, it seems to me that God is more reassuringly discovered in the simple and the ordinary, in the man who walked the streets of Jerusalem and sat by the seashore with his students, and plumbed the deepest spirituality of human possibility, than in the bizarre and extraordinary. Perhaps the ‘existential Jesus' is in fact the force that has maintained faith despite the grand claims of some who require amazing feats before looking into the depths of their existence.