Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to discuss the nature of the evidence available for discovering information about the 'historical Jesus' and how we might use that evidence. The phrase 'historical Jesus' is one that is potentially fraught with methodological problems (Meier 1991-94:1. 21-40). I am taking it here to mean (very crudely) Jesus during his earthly life in Palestine, without seeking to prejudge anything about the periods before or after that time. Any information we have about the historical Jesus will of course be limited by the nature of our sources. These give us Jesus as mediated through the eyes of others. Inevitably then one gets verbal portraits influenced by those who are relating them. To produce a 'real Jesus', untainted by the views of others and independent of the later pictures of him, is probably an impossible task. The 'historical Jesus' will in one sense only be 'the Jesus whom our sources enable us to reconstruct'. But that is one of the limitations within which all historical study must work.

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