I’m certainly no expert, and no doubt the real story, if we could somehow ever know it, would be full of amazing surprises, and that’s why the whole subject of something so fundamental to modern religion is so fascinating. And it’s by no means certain that Aslan got it right, either, even in the most rudimentary outlines. But to me his main argument – that Jesus was a political rebel in a time that we know was politically turbulent and had many such movements – is a persuasive one, and that he was subsequently deified by a combination of historical distortion and historical revisionism, notably by the Gospel writers in the process of institutionalizing Christianity, is typical of how this sort of mythologizing works. But to claim that Jesus never existed at all just runs contrary to most secular Biblical scholarship. The claims of “peer review” and the secretiveness surrounding it is suggestive of shady and shoddy work.