Essay: The Bible says that Jesus of Nazareth was a teacher who used miracles to help people. In reality he was a wandering man whose simple healing tricks and remedies were mistaken for miracles. He wandered around Judea preaching about the validity of Jewish laws. This earned him a large following. Roman officials learned of this and feared a revolt. So they had him executed; however this had the opposite effect. The Jewish sect that followed Jesus was pacified for a time but re-emerged as Christianity, with a larger following than before. Ultimately, and ironically, it ended up outliving the Roman Empire. Thesis: The historical Jesus was a Galilean man who lived in the first century AD and gained fame through chicanery and tricks, which secured him as the basis of modern Christianity.P1 : Secular Evidence: Jesus was a wandering teacher in Judea who amassed a large following. The Roman historian Tacitus (56 AD-176 AD) was a well-known skeptic who constantly criticized Christianity. He studied the historicity of Jesus Christ and came to the conclusion that he was a real man. “Christ, the founder of the [Christian] name, was put to death by Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea… through Judea, where evil originated.” This quote, from the works of Tacitus, appears in every known copy, minimizing the idea of ​​tampering by Christians. From this quote we can discern that Jesus was a Jewish man who wandered around Judea preaching. He eventually gained a massive following that attracted the attention of Roman officials confirming these notions in his writings is Lucian of Samosata (120 - ~180 AD). He wrote “Christians…to this day worship a man-…who introduced their…paper medium…). …through the use of spells.” Celsus says that Jesus learned tricks and skills in Egypt that would have seemed foreign to the people of Judea, who would then interpret his skills as magic, miracles, or even witchcraft, which he was also accused of in his writings dealing with the idea of ​​a virgin birth . It says that Mary was "driven out by her husband...having been convicted of adultery [with a Roman soldier]." this explains why she would claim to be a virgin and how one might think that Jesus did not have a father. Celsus also explains that Jesus was real, because Christians would never have made up the story of Jesus being baptized by John the Baptist about John the Baptist being Jewish and absolving a sinless man of his sins. Both of these contradict the ideology of the church making it unlikely that they would have made up this story.