Who Was Jesus Christ?

Charles Bradlaugh (1833-1891) was an English political activist and atheist. He founded the National Secular Society in 1866, 15 years after George Holyoake had coined the term "secularism" in 1851. The Charles Bradlaugh's pamphlet Who Was Jesus Christ? was written and published in 1860. Its publication marks a pivotal moment in the history of nineteenth-century British Freethought, secularism, and public criticism of religious orthodoxy, and serves as both an aggressive polemic against Christian dogma and a popularization of higher biblical criticism for a working-class audience. Writing under his well-known early pseudonym "Iconoclast", Bradlaugh composed this short treatise during a period of profound ideological transition in Victorian Britain. The year 1860 fell immediately after the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) and coincided with the emergence of Essays and Reviews (1860), a controversial collection by Anglican scholars that brought historical-critical methods into the mainstream of British theological discourse. Bradlaugh's essay reflects this larger intellectual shift, translating scholarly skepticism into an accessible, militant critique designed to dismantle the evidentiary foundations of orthodox Christianity. >Was Jesus Christ a man? If limited for our answer to the mere Gospel Jesus - surely not. His whole career is, on any literal reading, simply a series of improbabilities or contradictions. Who was Christ? born of a virgin, and of divine parentage? So too were many of the mythic Sungods and so was Krishna, whose story, similar in many respects with that of Jesus, was current long prior to the Christian era. Was Jesus Christ man or myth? His story being fable, is the hero a reality? That a man named Jesus really lived and performed some special actions attracting popular attention, and thus became the centre for a hundred myths, may well be true; but beyond this what is there of solid fact?.