Historical Controversies about Jesus  Anyone famous is bound to
attract a lot of attention. Stretch that attention out for 2,000
years, and you have that much more room for doctrines to develop
and controversies to get cooked up. Take a look at some of the
more persistent controversial questions about Jesus, the man
from Nazareth.  Did Jesus exist?  No one seriously doubted
whether Jesus existed until the extreme skeptics of the
Enlightenment era in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Taking their cue from the budding recognition that the gospels
were faith statements rather than documentaries, these folks
began to argue that the gospels were outright fabrications.
However, this theory isn't very plausible for a few reasons,
including these:    • The degree of detail in the gospels and
the surprising variation between them argues for rather than
against Jesus's existence. In other words, if you're trying to
perpetrate a fraud, you'd make sure to get your story straight
first instead of shooting yoursel