Was Jesus Christ Real?

An attempt to answer this very question is underway in a civil lawsuit in Italy. Atheist Luigi Cascioli, 72, is suing the local parish priest Rev. Enrico Righi, 75 in Viterbo, Italy, for asserting statements he made about Mary, Joseph, and Jesus were true. Cascioli says that Jesus cannot be proven to have existed and has been fabricated. Says Cascioli:

Jesus is fiction. The Church is fooling the people -- and must be held responsible.

Jesus' existence, of course, is well understood to be true. Beyond the Bible's Gospels, the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus wrote of him in the first century as well as Roman philosophers Pliny the Younger and Tacitus in the second century.

Responds Righi,

If Cascioli does not see the sun in the sky at midday, he cannot sue me because I see it and he does not.

The bottom line is that most people today consider the historicity of Jesus as accepted truth. Judaism and Islam agree with Christianity in saying he existed. The question is, was he the Messiah and is he God? It is these questions upon which the truth about Jesus hangs. The Bible says that he was and is.