Complete and unabridged, with 60 full-page plates by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, James Tissot and Claude Lorrain. A rationalist historian examines the evidence for the historical Jesus and argues that the gospels are a construction rather than a record. J. M. Robertson was a Member of Parliament, an autodidact and the most formidable of the mythicists. The book is the fullest statement of a case that has been largely rejected and never entirely dismissed. Sixty plates of harbours, Roman ruins and Old Master landscapes by Claude Lorrain and Giovanni Paolo Panini open the historical imagination onto the world in which the myth theory was argued.