December 12 1994

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"A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus. Volume Two: Mentor, Message, and Miracles," by John P. Meier (Doubleday/Anchor,

1,232 pp.; $40, hardcover); "Jesus the Sage: The Pilgrimage of Wisdom," by Ben Witherington III (Fortress, 352 pp.; $35, hardcover); "The Gospel of Jesus: The Pastoral Relevance of the Synoptic Problem," by William R. Farmer (Westminster/John Knox, 240 pp.; $19.99, paper). Reviewed by Robert W. Yarbrough, associate professor of New Testament at Covenant Theological Seminary, Saint Louis, Missouri.

In a cover story on "The New, Unimproved Jesus" (CT, Sept. 13, 1993), New Testament scholar N. Thomas Wright surveyed the most influential recent attempts to reconstruct the "real" Jesus. While sharply critical of some of the arguments he assessed, Wright concluded by affirming the value of historical study of Jesus: "Let us not be on our guard against learning more about Jesus as he really was. In dismissing maverick writers and rejecting unsound scholarship, we should not miss out on the possibility of a new vision of the real Jesus that could revitalize the church and challenge the world of the twenty-first century." Since Wright's piece was published, the output of scholarship on the historical Jesus has continued at a prodigious rate. Here is an update from the field.

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In recent years, books have appeared presenting Jesus in all of these roles, and others besides. It is enough to make nonspecialists throw up their hands in dismay, or maybe brandish clenched fists. Martyrs once died for the sake of a faith staked (literally) on the authenticity of Jesus' words, but today's high-profile scholars, with their radically incompatible historical reconstructions, seem to agree only that Jesus never said ...