BEFORE “The Da Vinci Code” and “The Gospel of Judas,” before Mel Gibson’s “Passion” and Martin Scorsese’s “Last Temptation,” before the Dead Sea Scrolls were unearthed and the Gnostic gospels rediscovered, there was a German scholar named Hermann Samuel Reimarus.

It was Reimarus, writing in the 18th century, who basically invented the modern Jesus wars, by postulating a gulf between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. The real Jesus of Nazareth, he argued, was a political revolutionary who died disappointed, and whose disciples invented a resurrection — and with it, a religion — to make sense of his failure.

In Reimarus’s lifetime these were dangerous ideas, and his argument was published posthumously. But within a few generations, historical-Jesus controversies inspired publicity rather than persecution. By the Victorian era, when the Earl of Shaftesbury attacked David Friedrich Strauss’s “Life of Jesus, Critically Examined” as “the most pestilential book ever vomited out of the jaws of hell,” he was just contributing to the book’s success.

Today there are enough competing “real Jesuses” that it’s hard for a would-be Strauss to find his Shaftesbury. Which is why every reinterpreter of Jesus not named Dan Brown is probably envious of Reza Aslan, the Iranian-born academic and author of “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth,” who achieved Strauss-style liftoff thanks to 10 painful minutes on Fox News.