Last October, before I was writing here everyday, I attended a debate at Conway Hall. It was titled "The House believes the Christian God to be a myth". I entered the hall with some expectation, having reserved a ticket to the event before hand. 
We had good speakers on both sides - two prominent members of the NSS, and two Reverends from the Holy Trinity Brompton church in West London.
I left disappointed. The debate was a knock-about. The side of the believers more so than the side of the non-believers - instead of touching in any serious way on the isues of philosophy or Christian theology, they called up members of the audience to testify to their conversion. And so they came, with their tales of woe - crime, divorce, prison, sexual abuse - and then the Light of the World, Jesus Christ, saved them from their sins.
But if that were bad, how about the statements of the non-believers. I hate to say it, especially as an acquaintance was speaking, but they weren't much better. A brief speech that took little account of the evidence, the arguments or the debates which take place in both the pew and the academy.
There is a serious issue here. If we are going to reject religion - as we should - we need to do it seriously. Even if we are to make fun of religion, we must do that seriously too. As Kierkegaard argued, if one is to have faith, one is engaging in an individual subjective passion - the highest of all possible subjective passions. As the Stanford Encyclopedia puts it, "This self is the life-work which God judges for eternity."
And so we turn to our many publishers and book sellers. If one wants to engage in these issues, if one believes them to be important, as I do, then what does one find in book shops? Well, in short, nothing.
One will find a handful of Bibles and Korans, and then one will find a whole load of conspiratorial books - The Da Vinci Code without the styling of a novel. If one looks at works on the historicity of Jesus, one finds much the same. Whether it is books that seek to unlock the mysteries that the Church has locked away for centuries, or to reveal supposedly hidden evidence.
These books are thoroughly charmless and academically stultifying. They cheapen the whole exercise regardless of their conclusions, because their methods are so idiotic. Our so-called debate in London brought up more points worthy of considertion - even though that consideration never actually arrived - than these Jesus as Conspiracy Theory books.
And it is with that background which I have been reading Who Was Jesus?, a mercifully short text (have a look in a theological library sometime and you should see what I am referring to) by Tom Wright, the Bishop of Durham, who has authored a number of studies of the New Testament.
It is an excellent cure for the rash of reinterpretive popular biographies and histories of Jesus. It takes the works of three authors and takes a critical look at them. Firstly, the British journalist, A. N. Wilson, whose book on Jesus was a best-seller both in Britain and the United States. Secondly, the various writings of the Australia author Barbara Thiering who uses a method based on the interpretation of codes to read new and radically different meanings in to the New Testament. Thirdly, the American bishop John Spong, who offers a sceptical, feminist approach to Jesus.
Bishop Wright demonstrates the numerous errors and failures of these writers in their approach to the historical Jesus, noting their internal self-contradictions and their hidden assumptions.
And it points us back to the key issue. We should not, as non-believers, be arguing these points for the sake of arguing. The evidence of the Gospels is clear as to who Jesus is claimed to be.
Just as those who are opposed to the government's policies should not waste their time with conspiracy theories about secret puppet-masters and unseen agents controlling the government, those of us who do not accept the claims of religion should not waste our time with these religious conspiracies. In a hundred years time, whose names are going to shine bright as critics of religion - Tom Paine, Bertrand Russell and Richard Dawkins or Dan Brown, Barbara Thiering and whoever else steps up to the Jesus conspiracy game.
There are people taking sceptical looks at the historicity of Jesus, and there should be. In fact, it is possible to argue that the whole enterprise of modern Biblical scholarship is in reaction to Tom Paine - a somewhat reductionist view, I may add, but not without support.
And so we end where we begin - if we do not take the enterprise of scepticism seriously and scholarly, the very issue will be taken over as fodder for light entertainment or, worse, supposedly scholarly light entertainment - the sort of pseudo-intellectual crap that keeps Radio 4 commentators in business. And that benefits nobody.
