"*It is important to recognize the obvious: The gospel story of Jesus is itself apparently mythic from first to last."" Robert M. Price, professor of biblical criticism at the Center for Inquiry Institute (Deconstructing Jesus, p. 260) 
 *The problem I have with all these versions of the so called ""historical Jesus"" is that they each choose certain early sources as their central evidence, and each presents a part of the picture. My own problem with this, as a historian, is that none of the historical evidence actually goes back as far as Jesus—so these various speculations are that, and nothing more. But what we can investigate historically is how the ""Jesus movement"" began. What the new research shows is that we have a wide range of teaching attributed to Jesus.  Elaine Pagels Professor of Religion, Princeton University. (MacArthur Fellowship, National Book Critics Circle Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, Rockefeller Fellowship) 
 *Some hoped to penetrate the various accounts and to discover the ""historical Jesus"". . . and that sorting out ""authentic"" material in the gospels was virtually impossible in the absence of independent evidence.""-Elaine Pagels, Professor of Religion at Princeton University 
 *I quite agree with Earl Doherty that the most important result of research carried out by writers like Wells, himself, Freke and Gandy, and myself, is the demonstration that the Jesus figure of the New Testament Gospels and Acts is a fiction, without any real evidential support. Professor Alvar Ellegard,Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Goteburg 
 *We can recreate dimensions of the world in which he lived, but outside of the Christian scriptures, we cannot locate him historically within that world.-Gerald A. Larue (The Book Your Church Doesn't Want You To Read) 
 *The gospels are so anonymous that their titles, all second-century guesses, are all four wrong.-Randel McCraw Helms (Who Wrote the Gospels?) 
 *All four gospels are anonymous texts. The familiar attributions of the Gospels to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John come from the mid-second century and later and we have no good historical reason to accept these attributions. -Steve Mason, professor of classics, history and religious studies at York University in Toronto (Bible Review, Feb. 2000, p. 36) 
 *The question must also be raised as to whether we have the actual words of Jesus in any Gospel. -Bishop John Shelby Spong 
 *Many modern Biblical archaeologists now believe that the village of Nazareth did not exist at the time of the birth and early life of Jesus. There is simply no evidence for it. -Alan Albert Snow (The Book Your Church Doesn't Want You To Read) 
 *Historically it is quite doubtful whether Christ ever existed at all, and if He did we do not know anything about Him, so that I am not concerned with the historical question, which is a very difficult one.  Why I Am Not a Christian, philosopher Bertrand Russell 
 *When it comes to the historical question about the Gospels, I adopt a mediating position that is, these are religious records, close to the sources, but they are not in accordance with modern historiographic requirements or professional standards. -David Noel Freedman, Bible scholar and general editor of the Anchor Bible series (Bible Review, December 1993, Vol. IX, Number 6, p.34) 
 *The various reports of miracles connected with Jesus' life may be true but a rational person will surely demand better evidence than the conflicting reports of four unknown authors writing decades after the events. The Case Against Christianity (1991) Michael Martin, professor emeritus at Boston University. 
 *James Dunn says that the Sermon on the Mount, mentioned only by Matthew, ""is in fact not historical."" How historical can the Gospels be? Are Murphy-O-Conner's speculations concerning Jesus' baptism by John simply wrong-headed? How can we really know if the baptism, or any other event written about in the Gospels, is historical? -Daniel P. Sullivan (Bible Review, June 1996, Vol. XII, Number 3, p. 5) 
 *David Friedrich Strauss (The Life of Jesus, 1836), had argued that the Gospels could not be read as straightforward accounts of what Jesus actually did and said; rather, the evangelists and later redactors and commentators, influenced by their religious beliefs, had made use of myths and legends that rendered the gospel narratives, and traditional accounts of Jesus' life, unreliable as sources of historical information. -Bible Review, October 1996, Vol. XII, Number 5, p. 39 
 *The Gospel authors were Jews writing within the midrashic tradition and intended their stories to be read as interpretive narratives, not historical accounts. -Bishop Shelby Spong, Liberating the Gospels 
 *Other scholars have concluded that the Bible is the product of a purely human endeavor, that the identity of the authors is forever lost and that their work has been largely ob