Conclusion
Conclusion
The history of Jesus scholarship illustrates the wide range of views scholars have articulated about Jesus in recent centuries. Biases and the demands of constituency affect not only popular religion, but also academic Jesus research. The presuppositions with which we start tend to dictate the way that we select our evidence about Jesus, the context in which we read that evidence about Jesus, and consequently the conclusions to which we come about Jesus.
We have noted these tendencies in the liberal Jesus frequent in the Romantic era; in the apocalyptic Jesus of Weiss and Schweitzer; in the existential Jesus of Bultmann; and in the revolutionary Jesus of Brandon. Some of these approaches have offered more useful historical perspective on Jesus than others have, but all illustrate that the context in which we read our sources affects how we understand them. The following two chapters offer a few more examples of this diversity and this problem.