of strengthening Christians’ faith or inducing other to turn to Christianity... During the nineteenth century the NewTestament was subjected to scholarly investigation for the first time. It was the beginning of systematic research into the life of Jesus.. In 1835 David Friedrich Strauss published his influential book The Life of Jesus (Das Leben Jesu). Armed with uncompromisingly critical rational views, he bluntly rejected the historical factuality of the Gospels. For Strauss they were nothing but legends and pious stories about the figure of Jesus, inspired by the Old Testament. Such opposition went further at the mid-nineteenth century. Bruno Bauer completely banned the figure of Jesus from historical research, simply declaring that the central figure in the New Testament was a mythical invention. Jesus and Paul were said to be nothing but literary fictions; and Christianity was seen as having been created by a fanatical group which concocted the faith around those two invented figures out of Jewish, Greek, and Roman religious traditions... Today there are well over 80000 monographs on Jesus, but their impact in terms of illuminating the historical figure is modest in the extreme. Who was Jesus? When he was born? What did he look like? When he was crucified? When how, and where did he died? Finding answers to those questions soon turned out to be an insoluble problem. In the books written during the first two centuries AD there is hardly any mention of Jesus as a real human being. The later sources are almost exclusively theological writings, which take for granted a belief in Jesus Christ as the Messiah and Son of God. So truly impartial written testimony is practically non-existent, and scholarship in thus not in a position, even today, to say in which year Jesus was born... Hardly any attention is paid in the canonical Gospels of Jesus’ childhood and youth, a phase of life of such importance for the formation of a person’s character. Even in the accounts of the brief period of his public impact there is only very sparse biographical information about him. It seems as if he was almost completely unknown to the historians of his time, or at least not worth mentioning. How is it possible that they paid no attention to the amazing miracles and extraordinary events recorded in the Gospels.

10. Martin, Michael, The Case Against Christianity, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1991, p. 37: Modern critical methods of biblical scholarship have called into question the historical accuracy of the Bible and, in particular, the New Testament. In the light of this critical approach to the New Testament many theologians have argued that not much is known about Jesus. For example, W. Trilling argues that “not a single date of his life” can be established with certainty and J. Kahl maintains that the only thing that is known about him is that he “existed at a date and place which can be established approximately”. Other scholars argue that the quest for the historical Jesus is hopeless...The most respected contemporary critic of the historicity of Jesus is G. A. Wells... Wells stresses that his skepticism concerning the historicity of Jesus is based in large part on the views of Christian theologians and biblical scholars who admit that the canonical Gospels were written by unknown authors not personally acquainted with Jesus, between 40 and 80 years after Jesus’ supposed lifetime. According to Wells they also admit that there is much in these accounts that is legend and that the Gospel stories are shaped by the writers’ theological motives. Furthermore, the evidence provided by the Gospels is exclusively Christian..

11. Foner, Philip S., Editor, The Life and Major Writings of Thomas Paine: “The Age of Reason”, A Citadel Press Book, New York, 1993, pp. 571-572: The history of Jesus Christ is contained in the four books ascribed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The first chapter of Matthew begins with giving a genealogy of Jesus Christ; and in the third chapter of Luke there is also given a genealogy of Jesus