Some time ago, Narnia man C.S. Lewis proposed a challenge. Make up your mind, he said, about Jesus. He is either a looney, a liar or the Lord. Being a clever chap, he was easily able to show that answers a) and b) were absurd. Therefore, Jesus must be Lord! Q.E.D.
However, the atheist and agnostic are no slow coaches in this arena either. "What if?" they wondered "There might just be a hidden answer d) - possibly also beginning with the letter L." Thus runs the now (fairly obvious) riposte to the C.S. Lewis challenge: "Legend!".
So maybe there was a bloke called Jesus and he ran around talking and doing magic. He died but a couple of hundred years later his biographers got a little carried away, copied each other (badly) and hey presto! Two Billion people now honestly think Jesus rose from the dead. An attractive argument. After all we all know how rumours start, don't we?
But, does the Jesus story sound like a legend? Let's look at a proper, honest-to-goodness, legend from ye olde days, also based on a real life person. Step forward King Arthur ...