Book description
The starting point for the book is the following anomoly: If Jesus
lived as has been supposed at the beginning of the 1st century AD, the
only NT documents written by a near contemporary, the Epistles of St
Paul, make no mention of him as an historical figure, neither do they
record any of his sayings, but rather they talk of him as a vision or
mystical experience of the risen Christ. Further, the same is true of
the earliest Christian non-NT texts, such as the Epistles of St Clement,
roughly contemporary with Paul. Furthermore, contemporary records of the
region from non-Christian sources, such as those by the Jewish historian
Josephus, fail to mention Jesus at all where we would expect them to;
the mentions that there are have recently been shown to be later
interpolations by medieval Christian apologists - the gospel accounts of
Jesus and his millieu are inaccurate in all major respects e. g. the
relative dates of Herod and Pilate, if contemporary Roman and Jewish
historians, who had no theological axe to grind, are taken as measure.
By comparative textual studies, the author shows that the gospel
accounts of Jesus' life and sayings were written approximately 100 years
after Jesus is supposed to have lived, and so 100 years later than
alleged contemporaries such as Paul, Clement, Josephus etc.
