This book presents a compelling argument that Jesus was never crucified by the Romans but slain and hanged from a tree, under Jewish law, as a heretic and blasphemer. It shows that behind the Virgin birth story lurks a darker tale of Mary the adulteress whose divine child was rejected by her husband, Joseph, as a bastard. And finally, it traces the accounts of Jesus' Resurrection to reveal that the earliest gospel (that of Mark) contains no actual sightings of a risen Jesus. With time, however, Christianity's claims of a Resurrection gradually evolved, progressing from vision to established fact - the result of purposeful embellishment and mythologising.