More importantly, McGrath asserts that “Historians do not depend on the Gospels, much less hypothetical sources behind them, for their conclusion that there was a historical Jesus.” He then points to Paul, and extrabiblical sources. This is very surprising, since even Ehrman and Casey thought little of the extrabiblical sources (as we all should; they are typically unimpressive and/or ambiguous and/or tampered with). And Paul, well, my book goes into a great deal of detail about the ‘Problem of Paul’. Apart from the many reasons he gives us to doubt his claims, he says little to nothing about a Jesus that was recently on Earth. He seems to always refer to a celestial messiah (as with other Jews of the time), and to revelations of this figure that are occurring ‘now’, decades after they supposedly happened if we adhere to the Gospel accounts. The few passages which historicists and Christians will often cling to tend to be ambiguous, or even interpolations. For example, any verse indicating that Jesus had flesh and blood does nothing for the Historical Jesus theory, as it also works on the Celestial Jesus theory. For a more important example, the ‘James is the lord’s brother’ verse can be variously interpreted (with even Christians arguing about its meaning), and it may well be an interpolation – historicist champion Ehrman also is quite aware that much of these have been tampered with by early Christians engaging in doctrinal battles with the non-orthodox, such as the Marcionites, who had very different views about Jesus. And to those familiar with the best cases for Jesus’ historicity, namely the recent popular books by Ehrman and Casey, they do in fact rely on the Gospels, and then, realising that they are terrible sources, rely on the vast numbers of hypothetical sources behind them. Even McGrath relies on the basic story of the Gospels in how he interprets the Pauline Epistles, though the Gospels are the later documents.