Jesus was a .....

Found this on Open Book

For years, now, we've been inundated with the latest incarnations of re-inventing Jesus from popular and scholarly sources alike.

At First Things, Anthony Sacramone offers a handy summary:
Jesus was a woman.
• Jesus was a space alien and is buried in Japan.
• Jesus survived the crucifixion and is buried in Kashmir.
• Jesus was a Buddhist.
• Jesus was a Muslim.
• Jesus was a Mormon.
• Jesus was a magician.
• Jesus was a Gnostic.
• Jesus was the son of Mary and a Roman solider.
• Jesus never existed.
• Jesus was never executed.
• Jesus was married and had children.
• Jesus was a social revolutionary when he was not a mere Mediterranean peasant.
• Jesus was an itinerant visionary whose real teachings exist only in distorted, fragmented form.
• Jesus was insane.
Some of this is clearly absurd, of course, but even that which is not absurd, which undergirds our encounters with Scripture and Tradition, is a widespreaed skepticism about the events of the life of Jesus - something I often heard in the midst of DVC fever, when people who self-identified as Catholic told me over and over again that everything that we "know" about Jesus was written down so long ago by essentially undependable guys (undependable either because they were simply recording "word-of-mouth" information (which must be unreliable) or because they were all about imposing their own concerns on the story), so...you know...whatever.