Introducing Who on Earth was Jesus?

Who on Earth was Jesus? was published by O-Books (John Hunt Publishing) of Winchester (UK) and Washington (USA) in April 2008. Within days, and following a three-star preview in Publishers Weekly, it sold out and was hastily reprinted.

There are innumerable books by Christians about the Christ of faith, books by Jews about Jesus the Jew, books by atheists about Jesus the myth, books by specialist New Testament scholars that are all Greek to everyone except New Testament scholars. And of course there are books proposing a married Jesus, a gay Jesus, a Jesus who was really a woman named Mildred... What is different about Who on Earth was Jesus?

This book is ground-breaking because in its 448 pages it looks at the theories and conclusions of all the main competing schools of historical Jesus scholarship.  With a scrupulous fairness and objectivity that has been commented on by reviewers from all parts of the religious (and non-religious) spectrum, David Boulton summarises the work of the world’s most eminent scholars and ‘Jesus detectives’ to present an engrossing account of the quest and the debates that rage around it.

As the Canadian Catholic Register put it, ‘To get an accurate sense of the sweep of scholarship would require one to read hundreds of books. Or you could simply pick up David Boulton’s new book... Its genius lies in its ability to accurately and concisely present the ideas of more than twenty prominent scholars whose work is representative of main currents of modern thought.’

Who on Earth was Jesus? comes in three parts:

PART 1, SOURCES, asks ‘Why search for the historical Jesus?’, summarises the history of the quest, discusses the available source material – Biblical, non-Biblical, Jewish, secular – and describes how critical historical analysis works.

PART 2, INTERPRETATIONS, is the meat of the book. It first looks at the controversial Jesus Seminar, emphasising its often overlooked diversity of viewpoints, before covering  more conservative and more radical schools of scholarship, from those that see no difference between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith to those that find only a  mythical Jesus.

PART 3, CONSEQUENCES, sets out where most scholars agree and what issues remain unresolved. Among the most contested issues is whether the apocalyptic ‘end-time’ texts  originate with the historical Jesus or his later followers, and what consequences this might have today.

For a full description of what this book contains, click on Full table of CONTENTS

For sample pages, click on EXTRACTS

Among the scholars discussed at length in Who on Earth was Jesus? are DALE ALLISON, THOMAS ALTIZER, MARCUS BORG, BERNARD BRANDON SCOTT, KATHLEEN CORLEY, JOHN DOMINIC CROSSAN, JAMES DUNN,  BART  EHRMAN, ROBERT EISENMAN, ROBERT FUNK, KAREN KING, JOHN KLOPPENBORG,   GERD LUDEMANN,  BURTON MACK, JOHN P MEIER, JOSEPH  RATZINGER, E P SANDERS,  GEZA VERMES, G A WELLS, WALTER WINK, N T WRIGHT

and many more...

‘Simply the best and most thorough account of the breadth and variety of historical Jesus scholarship.’ MARCUS BORG, author of ‘Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time’