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"Did Jesus Exist?: Early Non-Christian References", Chapter 3 in Is the New Testament Reliable?
"...[W]hat if Jesus never existed anyway? Many people have wondered
about that, and the thought has crossed my own mind more than once. Perhaps
he was a figment of the imagination of those early Christians? This
opinion has been periodically expressed in a serious way, most recently by
George Albert Wells, a professor of German who in 1971 wrote a book titled
The Jesus of the Early Christians...However,
as it happens, there is other early information about Jesus written by
non-Christians. These non-Christian sources fall into two broad classes, Roman
and Jewish...While this evidence is not extensive, it is noteworthy that it does not in
any way conflict with, but rather confirms, the historical information in the
New Testament."
