Who was Jesus? This question has dominated recent New Testament research, with scholars searching for its answer among biblical texts, the apocrypha and archaeological remains. Their work has garnered overwhelming interest among Bible scholars, who flock to hear each other’s accounts of the Real Jesus at academic conventions, and among the public, which has made books on the historical Jesus bestsellers. But, lately, a backlash has developed. In the December 1995 BR, New Testament scholar Luke Johnson (see “The Search for (the Wrong) Jesus”) claimed that these attempts to reconstruct the Jesus of history are destroying our only true […]