Pp. xxi, 194 , London , SPCK , 2009 , £14.99. Having published his dissertation, The Jewish Context of Jesus's Miracles, in 2002, Eve has built on that foundation and collected his work since to produce a second book intended for a more general audience. The result, as Graham Twelftree comments in his cover blurb, is that ‘(i)f there was only one book to read on the miracles of Jesus, it would need to be this one.’ Combining a courage to approach every difficulty head-on with a mellifluous style that both emboldens and soothes the reader to make the proper distinctions on hot-button issues, Eve is the Virgil who leads us astutely through the historical-critical topics up to, but not crossing, the portals of faith, though leaving open that possibility as an honourable option for those who choose to walk this path. Insisting on an adult faith or none at all, while skirting the programmatic scepticism and reductionism that have too often been the result of applying the secular historian's method to the gospels, Eve makes it look easy to walk a line between the yawning abysses of fundamentalistic, reason-abandoning surrender and acid-dripping scorn and dismissal; he carries the grateful readers with him on a voyage and to a final promontory they could never have reached on their own. With a critical review of the sources, Eve establishes Jesus as an itinerant miracle worker specializing in healings and exorcisms. He worked primarily among the Galilean peasantry who could not afford what limited Aesculapean arts there were available for their ills and who were reeling from the downwardly-mobile pressures of higher taxation, land-rentals, and foreclosures due to recent urbanisation by imperial client-kings. Illiterate, they generated a ‘little tradition’ of popular Jewish spirituality (in contrast to the scribal ‘great tradition’) that was rich with angelic visitations and demonology from the Enochic traditions. Eve does not eschew the contributions of social science to show how economic oppression and lack of a psychological safety-valve generates psycho-somatic illness in general and demonic possession in particular as socially acceptable vehicles for escape and protest. In the context of first-century Jewish Galilee Jesus could not have been a neutral medical practitioner; he combined his remarkably rapid healings and exorcisms with his preaching of an eschatological ‘kingdom of God’ that would overturn and replace the current ‘bondage to demons’. Eve lays his finger on previously little-emphasised traditions, such as the eschatological Davidic Shepherd of Ezekiel 34, to explain the role that Jesus moved into, that in a sense had been prepared for him, and which he reinforced. At the same time Eve is aware of historical parallels that explain odd quirks in gospel passages. For example, propaganda to promote Vespasian to emperor had him cure a blind man by applying spittle to his eyes; this well-known story probably supplied Mark with this detail to describe Jesus' actual miracle against this background with ironic contrast. Jesus cured by himself, on his own authority, however; it was not God working through him. Noting this higher Christology, Eve unpacks the nature-miracles of the stilling of the storm, crossing the sea, and feeding the multitudes as the evangelists' way of indicating the kind of deed that someone equal or superior to the other greatest prophet-cum-miracle worker in the Jewish tradition, Moses, would have done. The account is thus theologically shaped, but to make a real claim about Jesus. With the resurrection – an eschatological phenomenon – we leave history. Something clearly happened; Paul is our chief witness here. But again the perceptions and experiences make no sense except in the context of the tradition and as reinforcing a claim already filed by the other miracles. Jesus' miracles are too often an embarrassment for the modern mind. Both believer and disbeliever must eventually come to terms with them, and there is no better place to start than Eve's book.