The peril of modernizing Jesus and the crisis of not contemporizing the Christ?

Abstract

This essay points out the continuing tendency amongst researchers to modernize Jesus and suggests a framework for doing historical Jesus studies which avoids the perils of modernizing Jesus but still emerges from the project with something to say about Jesus that is of relevance to the contemporary world. The temptation to modernize Jesus can be curtailed by developing a prolegomenon to Jesus research (concerning presuppositions, hermeneutics, and history), taking the Jewishness of Jesus as axiomatic, and situating historical Jesus studies in the wider discourse of Christology.