Jesus Christ, American

In the middle of Patrick Allitt’s “The American Christ,” there is an advertisement for Malcolm Forbes’s book They Went That-a-Way , which tells “how the famous, the infamous, and the great died.” In the partial list of contents, it is significant that Jesus Christ is not listed. Jesus claimed to be the son of God, a claim validated by his resurrection from life’s only certainty—death. This is why we cannot “judge Jesus simply as a notable historical figure.”