Certainly New Testament is a bad history but it is not written to be a history, rather ‘the book’, the source of believes. However, Christianity is the faith centered upon Jesus rather than upon God (a substantially different view from Judaism) and Jesus is a historical figure. Any history is subject to a revision upon new historical facts - which is impossible in ‘the book’ and here Christianity is constantly open to unde- sirable challenges. Jesus was born, and lived, and died a Jew. In particular, as Michael Baigent points out (The Jesus Papers, HarperSanFrancisco, 2006), the historical facts on Jesus crucifixion dispute the narrations of his resurrection, divinity and equality in the Holy Trinity.

First, and importantly, crucifixion was historically the punish- ment for a political crime. Jesus was crucified between two other men, described as thieves in the English translation of the Bible. However, if we go back to the original Greek text, we find that they are described as Zelaots, the Judaean freedom fighters against the Roman occupation, and Romans considered them to be terrorists. According to the Gospels, Pontius Pilate gave Jesus over to the mobs, who then brayed for his execution on the basis of religious dissent. However, the Jewish execution for this particular transgression was death by stoning. Jesus’s crucifixion was a Roman punishment reserved for sedition, not religious eccentricity.

maintain the weight of the body and death by asphyxiation rapidly followed. In New Testament, John reports that the legs of the two men crucified beside Jesus were broken, but when they came to break Jesus’s legs, "he was dead already". Was Jesus drugged (sedated) on the cross? In Gospels a sponge soaked in vinegar was placed on the end of a long reed and held up to him; it was known that a sponge soaked in a mixture of opium and other compounds, such as belladonna and hashish, served as a good anes- thetic. Interestingly enough, saving Jesus maybe was in Pilate’s interest: there is evidence that Jesus rejected some aspects of the political activity of his Zealot supporters and that this actually was a reason of his betrayal.

contrary, his teachings indicate that he wanted each person to have the opportunity to find the Divine for himself or herself - or as he put it, to travel to the Kingdom of Heaven and be filled with the "Spirit of God". Michael Baigent claims the existence of two letters written to the Jewish court, the Sanhedrin, dated after the year of crucifixion (!), in which Jesus was defending himself against a charge of calling himself "son of God": what he meant was not that he was son of God but that the "Spirit of God" was in him - not that he was physically the son of God, but rather that he was spiritually an adopted son of God.

Well, instead of Jesus’s Kingdom of Heaven in ourselves we have a church, an institution.