real or not?

So let's begin with the New Testament: I have problems with the accuracy of the bulk of the latter part of this collection of books, however the earlier writings such as Paul's letters and to a lesser extent, the gospel of Mark, I believe are sincere. This is because they (Paul in particular) were writing about Jesus the person. The latter books tend to use Jesus as justification for the early church’s doings by stretching and in fact inventing many of His stories to suit their needs.

But while I'm here, to dispel the argument that Jesus was not an historical person, I tell you; if they were to create a myth, the early writers of the Gospels would not have had Jesus come from Nazareth, a place they despised—with doctrine stating ‘nothing good could ever come out of Nazareth’. And further, their message surely spells history as there is no other explanation for the writers to create a story so unheard of in their time, a story they would need to bend and twist to fit into the framework of their pre-modern ways for decades. If you were looking for something that isn’t historical, start at the stories invented later to try and rectify what didn’t sit well with early Christian prejudices—Jesus was born in Bethlehem, during a census and in a stable—now that may be a lot of things, but it’s certainly not history.

And the resurrection story—which is the crux of the Christian message. What gives it merit is not whether Jesus was crucified or raised from the dead, it is in the transformation that occurred within the disciples shortly afterwards—they had forsaken Jesus in fear and abandoned him in cowardice but suddenly became fearless, heroic people ready to die for the truth which now possessed them, becoming the most influential movement the world has ever known—no vision or hallucination I believe is sufficient to explain such a revolutionary transformation.

Perhaps they saw the love of God incarnate within him… he was betrayed, denied, persecuted, forsaken, tortured and killed yet he still loved the perpetrators. That’s why I believe God is in Christ—I don’t see it possible in any human to have this much capacity to love. I find in this Jesus a life fully lived and a love wastefully given.

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would be either a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg––or else he would be the Devil. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.  - C. S. Lewis