In this article, I would like to show how shaky the evidence is regarding the alleged existence of a would-be messiah named Jesus. Gods, like fine wines, I supposed, improved with age.Ībout a decade ago, however, I began to reexamine the evidence for the historicity of Jesus. Even in the case of other deities, such as Zeus, Thor, Isis, and Osiris, I had always taken it for granted that they were merely deified human heroes: men and women who lived in the later stages of prehistory – persons whose reputations got better and better the longer the time elapsed after their deaths. Nevertheless, I had always more or less supposed that it was improbable that so many stories could have sprung up about someone who had never existed. To be sure, I knew that some of the world’s greatest scholars had denied his existence.
Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Fortress, 1996)įor most of my life, I had taken it for granted that Jesus, although certainly not a god, was nevertheless an historical personage – perhaps a magician skilled in hypnosis. It would be easier, frankly, to believe that Tiberius Caesar, Jesus’ contemporary, was a figment of the imagination than to believe that there never was such a person as Jesus.
Some writers feel a need to justify this assumption at length against people who try from time to time to deny it. I have taken it for granted that Jesus of Nazareth existed. This article written by former Interim President and current member of the Board of Directors Frank Zindler and is reprinted from the Summer 1998 edition of American Atheist magazine.
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