Leaving aside the question of Jesus’s divinity, surely the man engendered fierce devotion to his teachings as well as to his person. One truly marvels at the courage of his disciples in the face of their own deaths. Like Jesus himself, offered life in exchange for retraction, they chose torture.

The disciples did not murder others in the name of their faith, instead they chose their own martyrdom. What was this madness which few of us today can understand? Would that their ‘madness’ had persisted instead of the gruesome history of ‘Christianity’ which followed for millennia.