If some New Testament miracle stories find no parallel in contemporary experience. they do have parallels, often striking ones, in other ancient writ… - Robert M. Price

Every religion diagnoses a problem, to which it then prescribes a single solution. One often feels the problem has been derived from the solution so as to provide a felt need for it, in the manner of Madison Avenue.

If someone charges that my endeavor here is wholly speculative, I congratulate him on his grasp of the obvious.

I realized, after studying much previous research on the question [of Jesus], that virtually every story in the gospels and Acts can be shown to be very likely a Christian rewrite of material from the Septuagint, Homer, Euripides' Bacchae, and Josephus. ...A literary origin is always to be preferred to an historical one in such a case. And that is the choice we have to make in virtually every case of New Testament narrative. [...] There may once have been an historical Jesus, but for us there is one no longer. If he existed, he is forever lost behind the stained glass curtain of holy myth. At least that's the current state of the evidence as I see it.