ALTHOUGH -MANY books have been written on the life of Jesus, Professor Morton Scott Enslin in his excellent book The Prophet from Naza, reth << has made clear that it is impossible to write a life of Jesusbecause there is not enough material. has been said, he writes, rightly 'we do not have enough material to write a respectable obituary notice'. The gospels are not a source for a biography of Jesus. Aside from the fact that the earliest of them were not written until at least a generation or more after the crucifixion, the authors were not interested in the history of the life of Jesus. Their major concern was with the theological accent on Jesus as the messiah. They are swathed with theological cloths. The gospels are of importance only for the theological conceptions about the Messiah, Son of God. In the gospels the messages of the ancient Hebrew prophets are interpreted with their notions. They believed Jesus to be the Messiah, Christ, who would be crucified and resurrected as prophetically foretold. Thus Professor Enslin is therefore right in his assertion that the gospels cannot serve as a source for a full biography of Jesus. In the first chapter Dr. Enslin deals with the world into which Jesus was born. He maintains Jesus believed that he was a prophet, a continuation of the old Hebrew prophets. He was certain that the Kingdom of God was at hand. He thought that his mission was to prepare the Judaeans for the time when the Kingdom of God would be supernaturally established. In this respect he opposed the Sicarii who wanted to establish a state where no lordship of man over man should prevail and God was to be the only ruler over mankind. They endeavored to establish such a society by force, terror. The views of Jesus were diametrically opposed to those of the Sicarii and vice versa. In the chapter Not as the Scribes Professor Enslin writes, has long been a popular Christian commonplace that the Pharisees misunderstood Jesus. It is far more rarely recognized that he may well have misunderstood There can be no question that the early Christians misunderstood the Pharisees. As to the question whether Jesus understood or misunderstood the Pharisees it can be said that he understood them. The difference of opinion between Jesus and the Pharisees was as follows. The Pharisees, as the religious