Late last year, while attending a large biblical studies conference in Baltimore, I was navigating the maze of bookstalls and I noticed a huge billboard promoting Ehrman's latest effort: How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee. A pity, then, that he is almost always wrong. Ehrman is a regular on the talk-show circuit, frequenting programs like The Colbert Report, The Daily Show, Dateline, CNN, and National Public Radio.Ī genuinely erudite scholar of ancient texts and a fierce debater, Ehrman is the bane of traditionalists and the champion of sceptics. He has several New York Times best-sellers to his name, including Misquoting Jesus: The Story of Who Changed the Bible and Why, Jesus Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible and Forged: Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are. A professor of religion at the University of North Carolina, he was formerly a fundamentalist Christian who de-converted to agnosticism, and now writes books exposing the apparently fallacious claims of traditional Christianity. For those who don't know, Ehrman is something of a celebrity sceptic in the United States.

The opening salvo this year comes courtesy of the indefatigable Bart Ehrman. Such tirades by the evangelists of scepticism seem almost to constitute a pastoral responsibility on their part annually to reinforce the ideological conceits of their tribe of followers, thus providing atheists, agnostics and 'nones' with reassurance that they needn't take Jesus too seriously.

Easter is now upon us, and we await the predictable onslaught of naysayers who declaim with an almost evangelical fervour that the Jesus story is one big lie.

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