Academic books on Jesus continue to proliferate. In this one, the last of three appendixes lists such books, most published since 1970: their number comes to about 140. Messias Jesus should be ranked high among them.The author has already contributed to this discussion, most notably with Jesus als Lehrer (3rd. ed., 1988; 4th ed. to appear in 2020). This earlier book treated Jesus’s putative Messianität in a significant subsection (see esp. pp. 298–352). In the book under review, Riesner takes this up as the main theme, dividing his study into 15 chapters. These cover (1) messianic hopes going back to King David, (2) the origins of Jesus’s messianic identity, (3) Jesus’s messianic call, (4) the beginnings of Jesus’s ministry, (5) the reign of God, (6) the family of God and the will of God, (7) Jesus’s circle of students, (8) the Galilean mission and crisis, (9) the revelation of Jesus’s identity, (10) Jesus’s early ministry in Jerusalem, (11) last days in Jerusalem, (12) the two trials, (13) the acquittal (that is, the resurrection), (14) the transmission of the Gospel materials, and (15) the scholarly investigation.Chapter 15 (the history of Jesus studies) covers ground generally found near the beginning of books of this genre. Riesner puts it at the end, signaling his historian’s conviction that we have access to a knowable past through literary, geographical, archaeological, and other means. It is the primary sources and the narrative they depict, not the criticism of those sources, that demand primary attention. He divides his short analysis of the history of research into seven sections: (1) the so-called pre-critical phase, (2) the Enlightenment, criticism, and hypercriticism, (3) life-of-Jesus studies along with literary criticism and the religionsgeschichtliche outlook, (4) form criticism and the Scandinavian school, (5) the Third Quest and the remembered Jesus, (6) methods and criteria, and (7) the reliability of the four Gospels, drawing on the testimony of two renowned historians who accorded high veracity to the canonical testimony: Wolfgang Schadewaldt (1900–1974) and David Flusser (1917–2000).Some 35 excurses dot the landscape of an already thorough handing of each chapter’s themes and issues. The majority of these (close to two dozen) are geographical and archaeological, drawing on Riesner’s extensive travels and investigations in the region. Seven examples: Herod’s temple, the Essene quarter in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Magdala, Sychar and Jacob’s well, Gethsemane, and Emmaus. Each excursus concludes with extensive bibliography, often augmenting already numerous footnotes. While the book is written in a readable register, researchers will find that Riesner has invariably dug deep into each area of special study.Other notable excurses deal with literary-historical problems posed by study of the sources. Four examples are Jesus’ genealogies in Matthew and Luke, Jesus’ address of God as “Father” (Riesner cites Hofius’s verdict approvingly: “As long as no early Jewish textual evidence is attested for calling God abba, Jeremias’ thesis [that Jesus’s usage was unprecedented] remains uncontroverted” [p. 111]), Jesus’ amen-sayings (which Riesner, again confirming Jeremias, holds are original to Jesus and point to his claim to be speaking revelatorily; p. 232), and the question of one or two feeding miracles in the Synoptics.An excursus that differs from the others takes up the question of miracles (pp. 165–70). Riesner deals fairly with skeptics such as Harnack and Bultmann but argues that the verdict of the evidence counts for more than the supposed demands of worldviews that exclude what we call miraculous events. It is surprising that Craig Keener’s two volumes on miracles find no mention here, though Keener’s work on Jesus and the Gospels (along with other works) is referenced elsewhere. In the same vein as this excurus is the subsection in ch. 13: “The reality of the resurrection.” Again Riesner cites prominent scholars who deny Jesus’s bodily return from death but draws on the strong research tradition that has arisen in recent decades to argue that the sources mean what they say: Jesus arose, and not merely symbolically or mythically. Riesner closes this section by pointing to NT references to Jesus’s resurrection as affirmed by, for example, Eckhard Schnabel, Klaus Berger, Larry Hurtado, and the former Pope Benedict XVI (pp. 399–400). A fascinating addendum, as it were, to Riesner’s discussion of the resurrection is Appendix 2 on the shroud of Turin. Drawing on research as recent as 2016, while he does not take a firm position himself, Riesner observes that, in view of the many converging lines of evidence, “some exegetes regard the shroud of Turin as consistent with the passion narratives of the Gospels”; it is accordingly “possible or even likely” that the remains embedded in the shroud are those of Jesus of Nazareth (p. 490).This book is distinctive on at least three counts. First, it subjects to exhaustive scrutiny the claims of multiple sources that Jesus was (and for his followers therefore is) the promised Messiah—and without polemics arrives at a positive assessment of those claims. It would be misleading to say Riesner “defends” Jesus’s messiahship, because that would suggest the book is defensive or a work of apologetics. While the findings have application in the apologetic arena, this is an attempt to do justice to the evidence and its interpretation through the centuries, not defend or even commend the Christian confession of Jesus as the messiah. The book is true to its vision: “In a scholarly book on Jesus it is not the originality of the researcher that should stand in the foreground; rather, the point is to follow the sources as closely as possible and to incorporate the best results of historical and exegetical research” (p. 481). (This is not to say, however, that the book offers nothing original, as Riesner himself points out: see p. xvii.)Second, the scholarship on display throughout is admirable in depth and wide-ranging in scope. Specialists are well advised to begin the book by reading the “Nachwort” (pp. 481–83). This describes Riesner’s academic pilgrimage, especially with respect to the schools of thought and scholars that have influenced the author the most. If there is a genius to this book, it is to be found in the wide range of mentors Riesner has sought out over his many years of research: not only German doyens such as Otto Michel (about whom Riesner remarks that with other students in the 1960s and 70s, “We were fascinated by his lectures, even if we often understood nothing” [p. 481]), Martin Hengel, Joachim Jeremias, Otto Betz, and many others, but also proponents of different approaches such as Birger Gerhardsson and Harald Riesenfeld, as well as English-speaking scholars such as Howard Marshall, Earle Ellis, and David Wenham. To these influences add the input of many Jewish and Catholic scholars, especially archaeological and geographical specialists with Holy Land expertise. To say that Riesner has sought to do full justice to the ancient sources is in no way to suggest that he has not taken the measure of contemporary scholarship on a remarkably broad scale.Third, for a primarily exegetical and historical work, this one is keenly aware of NT scholarship’s Achilles heel: it “stands in constant danger of having its historical inquiry influenced by philosophical constraints” (p. 474). Riesner lists these beginning with deism and rationalism in the Enlightenment, through the Tübingen school and liberal theology and Bultmann’s existentialist stress, down to the postmodern hour, regarding which Riesner cites historian Sir Richard J. Evans: “After all, the only possible reaction from historians who actually did accept these notions [radical relativism and extreme skepticism about all historical knowledge] was to stop writing history” (p. 475).Through awareness of historiographical blind spots and miscues through the generations, Riesner does not give up on history but returns to it. He succeeds at providing a treatment of rare acumen, nuance, and force. This book, like its predecessor Jesus als Lehrer, deserves to be translated into English.