Justin Brierley examines the latest reinventions of the Jesus of history. Ten years on from Dan Brown’s bestselling The Da Vinci Code, fresh rumours of who Jesus really was still shift books in their hundreds of thousands.

You could almost hear the collective sigh of exasperation (heaved by 1,000 Bible scholars) when Richard Dawkins tweeted a link to an article about the historical Jesus to his 850,000 followers in October. Unsurprisingly, the arch-atheist turned out to be promoting a speaking event which threw doubt on the traditional view of Christ. But this was more than your run-of-the-mill scepticism.

The speaker in question, self-published author Joseph Atwill, was presenting his thesis that Jesus Christ was a fictional character, invented by the Roman authorities to pacify the revolutionary sentiments of the Jewish people. The fact that Atwill had neither… (Register to read the rest of the article)