 According to Harpur, most modern biblical scholars agree the gospels were written many decades after the presumed death of Jesus, and he concludes the scriptures are inconsistent, inaccurate and do not represent a verifiable historical record.Harpur even makes the case that the original authors of the New Testament set out to combine popular pagan myths with prophecies of the Old Testament, never intending for readers to take these allegorical stories literally.In what he calls "one of the most far-reaching tragedies in history," he presents the case that the Christian church in the third and fourth centuries "made a fatal and fateful error," namely inventing the myth of a literal and historical Jesus based on "sublime truth."