THE BLACK SUTRA by Walter C. DeBill Jr. is the author's first short story fiction collection. His name should be familiar to many, as he was one of the authors included in the famous anthology DISCIPLES OF CTHULHU edited by E. Paul Berglund. THE BLACK SUTRA is a horror fiction collection, and will appeal to fans of H.P. Lovecraft & his "Cthulhu Mythos," as the story contains several Cthulhu Mythos tales, and also stories of classic Lovecraftian horror. Noted author and scholar Robert M. Price provides the introduction for the book.

After more than a century of New Testament scholarship, it has become clear that the Jesus of the gospels is a fictive amalgam, reflecting the hopes and beliefs of the early Christian community and revealing very little about the historical Jesus. Over the millennia since the beginning of Christianity various congregations, from fundamentalist to liberal, have tended to produce a Jesus figurehead that functions as a symbolic cloak for their specific theological agendas.
Through extensive research and fresh textual insights Robert M. Price paves the way for a new reconstruction of Christian origins. Moving beyond the work of Burton L. Mack and John Dominic Crossan on Jesus movements and Christ cults, which shows how the various Jesus figures may have amalgamated into the patchwork savior of Christian faith, Price takes an innovative approach. He links the work of F.C. Baur, Walter Bauer, Helmut Koester, and James M. Robinson with that of early Christ-myth theorists-two camps of biblical analysis that have never communicated.
Arguing that perhaps Jesus never existed as a historical figure, Price maintains an agnostic stance, while putting many puzzles and scholarly debates in a new light.
He also incorporates neglected parallels from Islam, the Baha'i Faith, and Buddhism. Deconstructing Jesus provides a valuable bridge between New Testament scholarship and early freethinkers in a refreshing cross-fertilization of perspectives.

Theologian and writer Robert M. Price is perhaps best known today for his scholarly arguments against the existence of a historical Jesus. Yet, he has been at various times in his career an agnostic, an exponent of Liberal Protestant theology, a nontheist, a secular humanist, a religious humanist, a Unitarian-Universalist wannabe, an unaffiliated Universalist, and a Fellow of the Jesus Seminar. Any way you cut it, he is not your typical atheist. This collection of his best essays demonstrates his love for the various great religions, which he views as endlessly fascinating expressions of the human spirit. Beneath the keen insights and sharp critiques he offers, whether the subject is theology, secularism, or biblical studies, the essays themselves are also deeply personal and revealing. Read together, they document his self-extrication from the born-again Christianity in which he dwelt for some dozen years--and his subsequent rise to celebrated freethought advocate whose work has challenged an entire field.