The book followed the previous research works on Early Christianity started in his works of 1930-s, and his ‘The Book on the Bible’ (1958). Noting that the earliest mention of the New Testament tales is found in the composition by Papias ‘Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord’ (c. 150); K. declares that in the mid-second century the books of the New Testament were not taken for God-inspired ones. He supposes that the Gospel from St Mark appeared in the early second century, the Gospels fro St Matthew and St Luce – c. 150, and the Gospel from St John even later. On his opinion, each big Christian community had its one New Testament, and by the early fourth century, there were several dozens of them. An intense struggle was started among various Christian groups because of the building canon, till in 364, the Council of Laodicea chose the four canonic Gospels.
The author notes numerous contradictions between the four texts, as well as historical, and geographical errors. He argues, that all New Testament tales about Christ were of mythological character. On his opinion, Christianity was born among Jews of the diaspora but the Gospels were written in Greek, because they were compiled not of Palestinian Jews, but for peoples of the Roman Empire, in general. The author takes the New Testament story of the life of Jesus in the tradition of the mythological school, declaring that in the religious mentality Jesus was transformed from god into man step by step, and the first stages of shaping his image as a god were kept in the Revelation of St John, and then – through the New Testament messages, under the influence of the Prophets’ books of the Old Testament – the human biography of Christ was created.