New Books In Religion

In the preface of There was no Jesus, There is no God (Amazon Digital Services, 2013),Raphael Lataster states that “it is not my job to disprove Christianity or any other religion. It is not my intention to destroy the fait of the faithful; nor do I desire to offend or upset believers in any way.” His new book is, in fact, meant to be an objective analysis of the evidence available for the existence of Jesus and of God. He details, for example, the evidence present for the two different “Jesuses” people believe in, categorized as the “Biblical Jesus” (the son of God who performed miracles and died for our sins) and the “Historical Jesus” (a non-divine but cool guy who preached and helped others). He relates how many people who fail to find evidence for a divine Jesus tend to fall back on the position that at least a historical Jesus existed, but Lataster thoroughly examines the evidence and finds it lacking for either version. By using Bayesian methodology and the mindset that history is a study of probabilit