Jesus: Militant or Nonexistent? Two Views Compared

Was Jesus a revelatory being, whom the Gospels transposed into a mythic history ... or a promoter of armed resistance against Rome, whom the Gospels whitewashed into a pacifist? With the weakening of the hegemony of confessional alignments in biblical studies, other points of view on the "historical Jesus” that have long had their supporters in the past have gradually gained more space and visibility. This includes mythicism, a radically agnostic position on the historical existence of Jesus, and another that finds Jesus to have been somehow involved in the armed resistance of the Jews against the Romans, another view that cannot be reconciled with any theological understanding of Jesus today. This book presents a well-composed debate between these two visions regarding the historicity of Jesus: Robert Price (Ph.D., New Testament; Ph.D. Systematic Theology) and Richard Carrier (Ph.D., Ancient History) defend the hypothesis of mythicism; and Fernando Bermejo-Rubio (Ph.D., History of Religion, and Professor of Ancient History at UNED) and Franco Tommasi (Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Salento and a published author on Jesus) compare that with the “militant Jesus” hypothesis, arguing the latter is more plausible than any other theory of a historical Jesus. This is an updated English translation of the original 2022 Italian edition Gesù resistente Gesù inesistente.