The Jesus Handbook

An authoritative collection of first-rate scholarship on Jesus, his world, the outcomes of his life, and the quest to locate him in history. The Jesus Handbook is an indispensable reference work featuring essays from a team of renowned international scholars on the significance and meaning of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Rooted in historical-critical methodology, it emphasizes a diversity of perspectives and provides a spectrum of possible interpretations rather than a single unified portrait of Jesus. The Handbook's dozens of authors--Jewish, Roman Catholic, and Protestant--each remain committed to the principle of interpreting the life of Jesus in context, while also giving due diligence to the implications of archaeological evidence and recent discourses in the hermeneutics of history. After an introduction that lays out the considerations of the task at hand, the authors survey the history of Jesus research and take a close look at the historical material itself--textual and