Actually, the skeptics, who take grim comfort from the apparent decline of many mainline churches, don’t often focus on Jesus himself. They have far softer targets to aim at (badly behaved clergy, for a start). But if they do mention Jesus, they tend to dismiss him with a wave of the hand. Just a first-century fanatic whose wild-eyed followers turned him into a god. Or, damning him with faint praise, just a mild-mannered first-century moralist, one of many great teachers down through the ages. Those are the internal dynamics of the western wind, the howling gale of contemporary skepticism.
