Those scholars who have assiduously ignored the quest for the historical Jesus because it was unintelligible, incoherent or just uninteresting must now take notice. With the publication of Jesus and Judaism [SCM, 1985] E. P. Sanders has taken a bold (though not unprecedented) and programmatic step towards making historical Jesus study intelligible, coherent and interesting. My aim here is to explore the program represented by Sanders' work and then to show how this work may actually lead to the demise of the quest of the historical Jesus.