The Truth About Jesus: Is He A Myth? --- by: M.M. Mangasarian (1909)

It took me a while to read this book even though there wasn't very much in it that I wasn't already aware of. It does however very clearly assert all the hypocritical and utterly ridiculous contradictions of the Christian's belief in the historicity of Jesus. I liked especially that the author took the time at the end of the book, in several appendixes, to address several of the prominent attempts by various Christian clergymen to critique the arguments and facts set out in this book. The author thus exposes the nonsensical attemps at reasoning the Christians use to "defend" their beliefs, which ultimately boils down to, "blind (un-reasoned) faith" in something that is clearly non-historically based (i.e. there is no historical evidence for the existence of Jesus at all, and there never was, which the church is ultimately forced to admit even while its clergy continue to ignorantly proclaim the opposite by asserting invented facts and rumors that have no basis in reality or history at all).

It totally amazes me that someone could read a book like this and yet continue to "believe" in the physical existence of Jesus! The author himself was a formally educated Christian Minister, until he could no longer sustain the delusion of Christ's existence in the face of reason and historical evidence. I personally think his only "error" is assuming that reason and evidence should be considered the only reliable source of knowledge and truth. This presumes that human intelligence is sufficient for determining the nature of our existence/reality (or what I call simply "experience"). Reason itself will tell us that reason is not enough. But, he is correct to use reason to demonstrate where reason fails. In other words, we can use reason to help us realize the errors of reason, and in this case the errors of Christian beliefs. But, we cannot use reason to assert some other "truth" or "explanation" (such as science) because as soon as we do we are falling back into the same intellectual "trap" that put Christians where they are today - the trap of presuming that human intellect is sufficient to comprehend the Ultimate Truth of our existence. It is not, and never will be.