AN Wilson 'rather ashamed' of book on Jesus

[...] Many years ago, a London publisher asked me to write a life of Jesus based on historical fact. I did so, making out Jesus to be no more than a very wonderful prophet, and the book was a best-seller. But I have always been rather ashamed of it, to tell the truth.

It missed out the large elephant sitting in the room beside me as I wrote - the millions of Christian believers who have existed since the time of Jesus. You see, there is almost no historical evidence about Jesus outside the Christian Gospels.

There are a few stray references to Jesus in ancient writers - one allusion by the Roman historian Tacitus and a few sentences by the Jewish historian Josephus, who was a contemporary of Jesus (sentences which many believe were added later by Christians anyway).

But the only serious written 'source' for the life of Jesus comes from the Gospels.

The Gospels themselves were all the products of an institution which still survives in our world: the Christian, or Catholic, Church. The Gospels were not written down to make a quick buck in Hollywood. Nor were they trying to attract a London publisher.

They were the written record, probably dating from a generation after Jesus, of what people already believed about Him, a group of men and women who were convinced He was still alive, that in their sharing of the Eucharist they were in touch with a man who had risen from the dead.

Why did they do so? That is for each and every human being to decide for themselves. The four books attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were written to sustain the communities of faith in Rome, and Palestine, and Asia Minor, which already in those early years believed Jesus to be Lord.

They contain stories of Jesus rising from the dead and leaving an empty tomb. A fantastic story which, in their time, as in ours, was rejected as unbelievable by the vast majority of intellectuals and pagans.

But this, believe it or not, is the story of Jesus. You either accept the Gospel narrative or you reject it. As soon as you try to make up your own version, as Dan Brown did in The Da Vinci Code, you enter the realm of pure fantasy.

There is something essentially ludicrous about the idea that the truth about Jesus could have been hidden for nearly two thousand years, only to be revealed by the director of Titanic. Read more