Did Jesus Even Exist? by Frank R. Zindler The American Atheist,
Summer 1998. Updated from The Probing Mind series, January 1987
I have taken it for granted that Jesus of Nazareth existed. Some
writers feel a need to justify this assumption at length against
people who try from time to time to deny it. 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. - N. T. Wright, Jesus and the
Victory of God (Fortress, 1996) For 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. To be sure, I knew that some of the world's
greatest scholars had denied his existence. 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. Even in the case of other deities, such as Zeus, Thor,
Isis, and Osiri