Preface
Preface
When scholars speak of “historical Jesus research,” they mean especially what we can infer about Jesus from purely historical study. Yet a major key to how we reconstruct the historical Jesus involves the sources we use to decide what we know about him. Scholars who depend largely on sources from the second century (such as the Gospel of Thomas) or later (such as the Secret Gospel of Mark, probably a twentieth-century forgery) will reconstruct the Jesus of history differently than scholars who depend primarily on Mark, Luke, and Matthew. The central and most important part of this book thus focuses especially on the questions of our sources, particularly on the potential reliability of our earliest sources.
Beyond that, this book samples some key themes, sayings, and actions that we can attribute to Jesus with a high degree of probability. It should be understood that when historians speak in terms of probability, we speak only of what can be ascertained by historical methods. We lack historical evidence for most of what has happened in history; no one claims that nothing happened except what we can demonstrate by historical means. As scholars often point out, studies concerning the historical Jesus merely sort available historical evidence according to historical methods; they cannot bring us fully face-to-face with the Jesus who lived, taught, and died in the first century CE. They are useful, however, in providing a way that historians as historians can talk about Jesus, and a critical minimum of assumptions that both Christians and non-Christians can use in dialogue about Jesus.