Books by Brights
Inventing Jesus: The New Testament Narrative as Fiction
Author:Paul Gabel
ISBN-10: 061548803X
ISBN-13: 978-0615488035
To Purchase: Amazon USA
Description
There are over two billion people in the world who self-identify as Christians, but almost all of them know next to nothing about how their faith began. The most amazing thing they don't know is that Jesus was a fictional character created by Mark, Matthew, and Luke.
Peter and Paul, too, are unlikely to have lived. Peter was created as a literary foil for the character of Jesus, and Paul's epistles may have been forged during the early second century.
This book offers two arguments: first, that there is no evidence for Jesus (or Peter or Paul) outside of the New Testament, and, second, that the excessive diversity and confusion of the first five centuries of Christianity was possible only because there was no human and historical Jesus to serve as an anchor for the faith.
Brights should be encouraged to transcend the “Jesus was a great teacher but not a god” approach and explore the reasons why he most likely never lived at all.
About the Author
Paul Gabel is a graduate of the History Department at the University of California at Berkeley and has taught history for 33 years. He has previously published "And God Created Lenin: Marxism and Religion in Russia, 1917–1929" (2005).
