Part 1: Introducing Prof. David Skrbina, his Argument, and the Counter-arguments.

Summary: This article intends to refute Prof. Skrbina's claim that the four gospels of the Bible are fictionalized accounts of Jesus perpetrated by the Apostle Paul, based on the apparent sparsity of extra-biblical references to Jesus and other claims that paint Paul as the 'mastermind' of what he calls the "Jesus Hoax". You may wish to view this video first: Jesus Myth, Self-Refuted.

How did Christianity emerge? Many believe it is owing to the information in the four gospels in the Bible’s New Testament, that there could be no Christianity without them. But how did we get them? This has been an ongoing question over the past two millennia, especially in the last 200 years with the rise of skepticism and the literary science of textual criticism. The Christian answer to this question is the claim offered by the New Testament writers themselves—that the four gospels are the true accounts of a most extraordinary man named Jesus who actually said and did the things that are reported of him by their writers. The result was the birth of the ancient Christian community fueled by Jesus Christ himself with the well-known teachings and miracles that the gospel writers attribute to him. But there are other more skeptical theories which Prof. Skrbina calls the "Jesus Hoax".