The Jesus Handbook

Abstract

An authoritative handbook on Jesus, his world, the outcomes of his life, and the quests to locate him in history. The Jesus Handbook is an indispensable reference work featuring essays from an international team of renowned 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 — all 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 otherwise. From this foundation, the Handbook then details the life of Jesus before at last exploring the reception and effects of Jesus’s life after his death, especially in the first centuries CE. With this wealth of information available in a single volume, scholars and students of the New Testament and early Christianity — and anyone interested in the search for the historical Jesus — will find The Jesus Handbook to be a resource that they return to time and again for both its breadth and depth.