The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately After the Execution of Jesus.

By John Dominic Crossan. HarperSanFrancisco, 653 pp., $30.00.

If we are to believe that God deliberately sent his only son into the world to be brutally tortured and crucified, then I take that to be transcendental child abuse, and I will not have it," John Dominic Crossan stated at a recent Duke University conference on "Jesus in Context."

Crossan cannot reconcile ...