About 500 years after the time of Confucius, the Buddha, Zarathustra, and Socrates, a young Jewish peasant/carpenter in the remote province of Judaea in the Roman Empire began a brief three-year career of teaching and miracle working before he got in trouble with local authorities and was executed. In one of history’s most unlikely stories, the life and teachings of that obscure man, barely noted in the historical records of the time, became the basis of the world’s second great universal religion, after Buddhism. This man, Jesus of Nazareth, and the religion of Christianity that grew out of his brief career, had a dramatic impact on world history, similar to and often compared with that of India’s Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha.