Doherty's book has made quite a splash on the internet. Earlier drafts of his work are available online. Now he has bundled it all up into a popularising book, which has certainly been found convincing by many people. His thesis is that there is no evidence that Christianity, the world's largest organisation, was in fact founded by a man known as Christ. This idea enjoyed considerable popularity among atheists a century ago, in the era before archaeology was possible in the bible lands. Doherty unashamedly refers to the ideas of this period, and clearly would like to revive the exploded Tubingen thesis of F.C.Baur.

Most people will presume Doherty to be the master of his material, and he affects scholarship. However there are elements in his writing that raise questions about this.

This can be seen most easily with reference to a portion of his book on which he has perhaps devoted least time. Rather than discuss the whole volume of his work, perhaps it would be most useful to zero in on the portion for which we have most evidence in the surviving literature, the second century. Doherty devotes a single chapter to this in the book.

Most readers of his discussion on the second century will come away with the impression that a few writers support the standard view, most say nothing, and from this silence it follows that they did not care about the issue. But it is possible to review all the c.2 writers. This I have done, and found that, of the 10 writers, 6 (perhaps 8) explicitly assert the incarnation of God as man, and only 4 (perhaps 2) are silent. The silent writers are also those for whom the least works have survived. Those for whom we have some theological works both deny his thesis, and deny that it is unimportant. Doherty's failure to grasp this is difficult to explain. The lack of any useful footnotes in this chapter likewise is not encouraging.

The dating of Minucius Felix to 150 is far too early, and ignores the massive literature, such as Axelson's Das Prioritatsproblem, on the vexed question of the interdependence of Tertullian and MF. Modern philologists unanimously date MF to around 230AD - some even to 258 (vide notices in the Chronica Tertullianea et Cyprianea). Once it is recognised that the author may well be a contemporary and colleague of Cyprian, what then becomes of the author's argument about a 'smoking gun'? The idea that MF was second century (160, not 150) is again dateable to 1910, and shows the antiquity of Doherty's information.

In the chapter, Doherty also makes a point based on the presence of the Latin conjunction 'nam'. It's hard to see that this is worth making; or if it is, surely it needs to be made with reference to the philology on the use of parts of speech as it altered in the second century? But Doherty is not familiar with philology, it seems, and this tends to suggest an undergraduate knowledge of the subject, and not specially in Latin.

Where his presentation can be checked, it is misleading. Where he intends to give an impression of scholarship, he in fact indicates that he lacks it. Any interested reader will be frustrated by the sporadic lack of proper references, although in this printed version he has added more to some of the chapters.

The work is, in short, a polemic with references to data stuck on to it for decoration. But those who really want to know would be well advised to seek out the readily accessible primary data, devise ways to test the ideas, look for the logical fallacies, and, above all, obtain more up to date information on the present state of scholarship.

But it will be of interest to any who wish to see how strongly an argument based on absence of evidence can be made to those unequipped to perceive the fallacy. As such it will be a useful bibliographical reference for ideas that will certainly be widely canvassed, and a useful way to find the source of the many myths that will be derived from it. As such it is perhaps a useful purchase to anyone discussing these issues, so long as they ignore the persuasive style and look at the testable facts.