The Historical Figure of Jesus

by E.P. Sanders

Book Overview

A biography of the historical figure of Jesus. The book studies the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, distinguishing the certain from the improbable, and assessing the historical and religious context of Christ's time. The spread of Christianity is also discussed.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140144994
• ISBN13: 9780140144994
• Release Date: January 1996
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 0.56 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.0" x 7.7"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

A wonderful, easy read

THE AUTHOR E.P. Sanders is a biblical scholar of the highest order. After receiving two baccalaureate degrees from his home state, Texas, he pursued graduate studies in Gottingen, Jerusalem, Oxford and New York, and earned a Th.D. from Union Theological Seminary. He has recently obtained two other doctoral degrees, Doctor of Letters from the University of Oxford and Doctor of Theology (honoris causa) from the University of Helsinki. In 1966, he began teaching at McMaster University in Ontario, and in 1984 he was elected Dean Ireland's Professor of Exegesis at the University of Oxford as well as Fellow of Queen's College. In 1990, Sanders joined the Faculty at Duke University where he currently serves as Arts and Sciences Professor of Religion. He has also held visiting professorships and lectureships at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland and Cambridge University. Sanders' primary area of research involves interpreting the relationship between first-century Judaism and Christianity, and his works have been translated into nine different languages. Some of these works include: Paul and Palestinian Judaism (received several national awards), Jesus and Judaism (won the Grawemeyer Award in Religion, denoting the best book on religion), The Tendencies of the Synoptic Tradition, Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People, Studying the Synoptic Gospels (co-authored with Margaret Davies), Jewish Law from Jesus to the Mishnah, Paul: Past Master, and Judaism: Practice and Belief 63 BCE-66 CE. Touting this impressive résumé, Sanders presents The Historical Figure of Jesus. THE SUMMARY In his introduction, Sanders lays out exactly what the focus of this book will be: "The aim of this book is to lay out, as clearly as possible, what we can know [about Jesus], using the standard methods of historical research, and to distinguish from inferences, labeling them clearly as such" (p. 5). He prefaces the work by warning that historians' knowledge of Jesus is limited, and little can be asserted with absolute certainty. He suggests, however, that far more is known about Jesus than other historical figures of roughly the same time period. Sanders' focus is not on explaining theology, and he does not seek to account for what God did through Christ. Of course, he must deal with theology: it played a major role in Jesus' life as well as that of the evangelists', but the book is fundamentally historical. Sanders outlines what historians can know about Jesus of Nazareth-a first-century Palestinian Jew who lived in a remote part of the Roman Empire (p. xiii). Feeling the need to thoroughly introduce context to the study of Jesus, Sanders devotes the first five chapters to introductory material. The second chapter provides a bird's-eye view of Jesus' life and the aftermath of his life. Next, Sanders deals with the political climate of Palestine before and during Jesus' life which he describes as being distinctly Jewish, yet puppets at the mercy of Roman authori

The best short book on the historical jesus

I have purchased about 20 books on historical Jesus. This is my favorite because it's not too long, and because it balances the historical context with the evidence from the gospels. Sanders is an excellent scholar, and a great writer. He does not provide unfounded claims about Jesus but basis his conclusions on evidence. When the evidence is slim, which is most of the time, he admits it..

An island of sanity in an ocean of lunacy

Tired of books on the "historical" Jesus that reconstruct him as a "peasant Jewish cynic" or a first-century proto-Marxist? How about the ones that tell us the New Testament canon is historically useless, but the gospel of Thomas provides reliable insights into the esoteric Buddhist teachings Jesus learned during his lost years in India or Tibet? Or how about the ones that tell us Jesus never existed in the first place, or the ones entitled "Jesus the ________" (fill in the blank with your favorite) that tell us the key to understanding him is to interpret/reduce all his words and deeds according to the item we filled in the blank with?Really? Me too.You'll get none of that from E.P. Sanders. This book is, for my money, _the_ best single volume currently available on the historical Jesus. (It may be the most readable, too. I taught a short course out of it five or six years ago and we all had an easy time with Sanders's clear, crisp expository prose.)Sanders's view is that we actually have quite a bit of information on Jesus -- not, perhaps, as much as we might like and not in as much detail as we would probably prefer, but quite a bit all the same. And in this book, he sorts through it carefully and summarizes what he thinks we can know on the subject.He is careful with his evidence and doesn't put too much weight on any single item. For example, he is doubtful that we can learn much from the "titles" Jesus supposedly applied to himself, partly because it's awfully hard to tell whether he _did_ apply them, and partly because even if he did so, we'd still have to determine exactly what _he_ meant by them. Either way, we have to look at the broad outlines of Jesus's life and career, so that's just what Sanders does.And he is eminently well qualified to do it. Sanders is of course the author of _Jesus and Judaism_, a delightful work that utterly demolishes popular and scholarly misconceptions about Jesus's relationship to Judaism; his work on the Judaism of the Second Temple period is well known and well regarded. In this volume he puts all of that work to good use and carefully locates Jesus within the Judaism of his time.His conclusion is that Jesus understood himself to be acting in some manner in God's stead -- as God's "viceroy," Sanders puts it using his own preferred term, since Jesus regarded God Himself as "King." For Sanders's Jesus, the "kingdom" was partly a present and partly a future affair; Jesus expected God to do something novel in the relatively near future, and he thought he himself was in some manner its harbinger, even to the point of being able to offer a place in the "kingdom" to sinners who had repented but not fully returned to the observance of Mosaic law. His actions in the Temple were a prophetic demonstration of the coming kingdom, and it was this action that led to his execution by crucifixion.All in all, a refreshingly sane historical account (although I personally think it de-emphasizes the "political" character of J

Jesus the Viceroy of God

E.P. Sanders is without doubt one of the most pre-eminent scholars of the New Testament and of historical, that is, Second Temple, Judaism alive today. His expertise and breadth of knowledge are acclaimed by all quarters of biblical scholarship as often as his work is seen in print, which is it to say that this is often. Particularly he has made key entries into the current round of the academic Quest of the historical Jesus. The first was with his 1985 book "Jesus and Judaism", a technical and academic study in which Sanders outlined his position vis-a-vis Jesus as an historical personage about whom we could know a number of things with a substantial degree of certainty. Amongst these were that Jesus was a Galilean who preached and healed, that he confined his activity to Israel and that he was baptised by John the Baptist. All in all he stated 8 "almost indisputable facts" in that book which any reasoned and reasonable account of the historical Jesus should be able to account for. With "The Historical Figure of Jesus" Sanders presents a much more reader-friendly (and appreciably less technical though still academically formulated) account of Jesus of Nazareth in which he ups the statements he now considers as "almost beyond dispute" to 15 and attempts to draw his picture of Jesus around these chosen static points. Clearly, then, the things Sanders considers as fixed are crucial here. These demonstrate some modification of Sanders' position from his earlier book and the addition of some "equally secure facts" about "the aftermath of Jesus' life". They are not things which scholars or general readers would find particularly controversial. But then the devil is always in the detail.Sanders' construction of the historical Jesus as displayed in "Jesus and Judaism" is well known for being based around the incident in the Temple where Jesus turns over tables and drives out animals and/or people. This is seen as the proximate cause of Jesus' crucifixion and the event which gives us insight into his orientation as one interested in "restoration eschatology". But with "The Historical Figure of Jesus" Sanders takes a different tack, assuming much less background knowledge on the readers' part and so, consequently, providing the assumed reader with chapters of background on the political and religious settings of Jesus and on the nature of the documentary sources for his life. These chapters are as erudite as they are compact and would provide even the most novice-like reader of historical Jesus literature with a key to begin opening a number of the locks Sanders later presents. Having given background, Sanders proceeds to give chapters (some of which are so good they should be regarded as set texts on the subjects they address) which orientate themselves around Jesus' assumed interest in the Kingdom of God, his performance of miracles, the meaning of his teaching in Jewish context, Jesus' own view of himself and a programmatic chapter on Jesus' last week