As the Jesus of History started fading away fast as a result of researches in the eighteenth and the nineteenth century, the Jesus of Fiction came increasingly to the fore. The process was helped a good deal by the knowledge which the modern West was acquiring at the same time about the ancient world. India, China, Iran, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Palestine and Greece of antiquity were no more being seen through the glasses of Christian theology or in the light of the Christian missionary lore. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Library after the Second World War provided a new background for ancient Palestine at the period when Jesus is supposed to have functioned. "As a result, Jesus is no longer a shadowy figure existing in the simplistic fairy-tale world of the Gospels. Palestine at the advent of the Christian era is no longer a nebulous place belonging more to myth than to history. On the contrary, we now know a great deal about Jesus's milieu, and far more than most practising Christians realise about Palestine in the first century — its sociology, its economy, its politics, its cultural and religious character, its historical actuality."'
Scholars and story-tellers have been using every bit of historical information, every contradiction and contrary hint, every faint figure, and even stray sentences in the gospels for presenting Jesus in novel and strange, even startling, ways.
Looking at the plethora of publications which have been pouring in during the twentieth century, we find two types of literature on the subject. A majority of writers think that no matter how heavy the theological rubble happens to be, the "real" Jesus buried under it can be rescued and made to live on the stage of history. On the other hand, there is a minority of scholars who feel that no matter whether a man called Jesus existed or not, the Jesus of the gospels is a synthetic product fashioned out of diverse materials floating in the Mediterranean world around the time he is supposed to have functioned. I give below a brief survey of the literature of both varieties that I have read or references to which I have noticed.