1 I thought that might be a fairly simple task, but as I worked on the revision I discovered that more than 50% of the material in the new book would be completely new.

That book became a standard textbook in many colleges and universities and I recently revised it for a second edition. Near the end of that decade, I published a book that surveyed the field and summarized the major themes and positions.

In the 1990s, the field of historical Jesus studies enjoyed a significant renaissance and attracted an inordinate amount of media attention. See Also: Jesus as a Figure in History: How Modern Historians View the Man from Galilee, 2nd edition (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2013) The scholars frequently maintain that they are not trying to discover what might be true of Jesus, but what is verifiable. Such analysis is supposed to be free of religious (or anti-religious) bias, and scholars engaged in the field call each other to task when they suspect that one’s conclusions have been influenced by personal predilection. Historical Jesus studies is a science that attempts to determine what can be known of Jesus on the basis of historical research alone, that is through the analysis of data pertaining to Jesus in accord with the same standards that would be employed when analyzing data pertaining to any other figure from antiquity.

The Historical Jesus by James K. Beilby