Historical Jesus: An Essential Guide Book

I want to approve of this book far more than I actually do. I enjoy it, I'm planning to assign it for a class, I think it's an excellent introduction to the "Quest" for the so-called "historical Jesus". However there's a not-inconsiderable thread of religiosity which seems to run throuhgout the book, and my academic training has prejudiced me against anything even slightly confessional (which, as i have noted elsewhere, is hilarious given how essentially confessional the vast majority of the more atheistic and agnostic scholarship on religion actually is). I'm a huge fan of Charlesworth's work on pseudepigraphal texts and the Hebrew Bible, and I LOVE this text's indictments of both modern scholarship and old-time theology, but... Well, let's focus on the aspects which aren't subject to my inability to read objectively due to my modern scholarly biases.

He capably and admirably disarms many of the more sensationalistic theories about Jesus and early Christianity, demonstrating that, compared to the four canonical Gospels, these theories are actually far more fantastic (cf. also Freud's "Moses & Monotheism"). He points out that claims that Jesus was an Egyptian-trained sorcerer, a Cynic sage, a Buddhist philosopher, a Gnostic teacher, etc. ignore the profoundly Jewish nature of everything anyone contemporaneous to Jesus ever records him as having taught.

He notes that, while Jesus being married would make perfect sense given his religious and historical context, there is no historical evidence that he was. He also points out that the only "evidence" of any sort of romantic relationship is a fragmentary portion of the apocryphal Gospel of Philip involving Mary Magdalene which was a creation of an extremely localized Gnostic community in Egypt written at least a century (most scholars estimate 2 centuries) after the "canonical" Gospels are estimated to have been written. Scholars often cite a lack of evidence for a traditional interpretation as a justification for discarding that interpretation; yet they also IGNORE absence of evidence when it might undermine their own theories and interpretations. I applaud his honesty.

He also notes the deplorable absence of archaeology in modern Jesus research, owing largely to the majority of scholars involved in the research being text-based and having no training IN archaeology; this results in scholars either ignoring valuable evidence or buying into half-baked theories grounded in their own misreading of the archaeological evidence. The same can be said about their lack of knowledge regarding the Hebrew Bible and pseudepigrapha Good stuff!