Joseph Wheless (Montgomery County, Tennessee 1868-1950) was an American lawyer who wrote promoting the Jesus myth theory during the early years of the 20th century. He was son of Joseph Wheless Sr. (1830–1899), grandson of Aquilla Wheless. His mother Myra McCall, died when he was young, and his brothers and sisters were by his father's second wife. Wheless was raised Southern Methodist but later questioned the verity of the scriptures, studying their sources in detail. As a lawyer he defended American free-thinking and atheist organizations, was instructor in military jurisprudence at the University of Arkansas and held the rank of major in the department of the Judge Advocate General. Also self-taught, Wheless was a successful lawyer and a very outspoken Jesus-was-a-myth writer. He studied for the bar while articled in his uncle's firm. Wheless served as counsel for several American free-thinking organizations and defended many cases involving issues of atheism. A specialist in South American law, he was also for some time an instructor in military jurisprudence at the University of Arkansas and a major in the Judge Advocate General's Department. For his writing on religious topics, he received the honorary DD from the University of Denver. According to Wheless not only had no one called Jesus ever lived, but Christianity and the Bible are based on deliberate fraud, Christianity's continued existence is a conspiracy using persecution and oppression to perpetuate itself, to enslave people. Works Is it God's Word 1926 Debunking the Law of Moses 1929 Forgery in Christianity 1930 See also Aletheia M. D. Ethan Allen I. Newton Baker Dan Barker Rev. L. M. Birkhead, Unitarian humanist Luther Burbank William Kingdon Clifford Chapman Cohen Moncure Conway Jeremiah J. Crowley Clarence Darrow Earl Doherty Theodore Dreiser William Floyd George William Foote Clay Fulks, Arkansas Socialist Helen Gardener Marshall Gauvin Isaac Goldberg Emma Goldman Kersey Graves E. Haldeman-Julius Baron d'Holbach Rupert Hughes Robert G. Ingersoll James Hervey Johnson Julien Offray de La Mettrie Joseph L. Lewis M. M. Mangasarian Joseph McCabe John Edwin McGee Colonel John Henry Patterson (1867–1947) Michael B. Paulkovich Charles Francis Potter Robert M. Price Salomon Reinach John Remsburg Ernest Renan Richard Robinson (1902–1996), An Atheist's Values G. Vincent Runyon Elizabeth Stanton Albert Schweitzer (1813-1883) Woolsey Teller Barbara Thiering Alfred Russel Wallace Lemuel Washburn Charles Watts G.A. Wells Andrew Dickson White Frank Zindler References American lawyers American atheists 1868 births 1950 deaths Christ myth theory proponents Freethought