Even among modern atheists, a fragile consensus holds that Jesus was at least a real person, whose historical presence, though embellished, has been reliably established in the order of disinterested scholarship. Whether he is envisioned as peace-loving rabbinical sage or as a militant prophet of doom, this man called Jesus is widely assumed to have had an important, even a profound, impact on the course of world history.

But in the early years of the 21st century a radical though not particularly new thesis has become increasingly difficult to ignore. This thesis, as it is argued over and disseminated across the Internet and made accessible in a rapidly growing number of books, threatens to displace the regnant historiographical paradigm with a simple but devastating proposition: that Jesus never existed at all!

Having devoted much of his life to the careful study of ancient history, Humphreys harbors no doubt: Jesus, the non-existent son of a non-existent father, will soon be consigned to a place among his ancestors Adam, Noah, Abraham, and Moses in the realm of mythology, not history.

Let this be your introduction to the ultimate heresy!