The future looks ominous for social liberals, even devout Christian ones, religious studies scholar and best-selling author Bart Ehrman warns in a thoughtful interview in the latest edition of American Atheist magazine.

...Invented history?
“The question is whether somebody sat down and plotted it out and said, ‘I think I’ll make this up,’ or if it happened as a rumor — somebody just tells a story, and somebody else tells a story, and after a while nobody knows where it came from. In either event, the census did not happen.”...

“Many Christians don’t want to hear this, but the reality is that there are lots of other explanations for what happened to Jesus that are more probable than the explanation that he was raised from the dead. None of these explanations is very probable, but they are more probable, just looking at the matter historically, than the explanation of the resurrection.”...