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Even C. S. Lewis was skeptical of searches for the "historical Jesus." And why not? Even before Albert Schweitzer published his The Quest of the Historical Jesus in 1906, many Christians bemoaned such searches because they usually denied the claims of the Gospels. The quests' latest manifestation, the Jesus Seminar, has voted out almost every Gospel saying of Jesus as unhistorical.

So why should Christians who believe in a Jesus available to all people of all times even care about what historians say about Jesus' life on earth?

We posed this and other questions to Tom Wright, whom Time magazine called "one of the most formidable of the traditionalist Bible scholars." He is author of several influential books on the Jesus of history, most notably Jesus and the Victory of God (Fortress, 1996).

If Christians believe in a resurrected Lord who transcends history, why should we even bother with the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth?

If we believe as traditional Christianity always has that God became truly human in Jesus of Nazareth, then he was an actual person who worked and spoke in this world. When Christians allow "the Christ of faith" to float free, they reinvent him to suit particular ideologies.

The most obvious recent example is how Hitler's theologians made a Christ who legitimated Nazi ideology. That happened while many German theologians were saying they couldn't know much about Jesus historically.

The Jesus who actually was shows us who the transcendent Lord actually is because Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever. So the yesterday is just as important as the today and forever.

Do you see some dangers in using history as a means to examine Jesus?

There are always dangers, particularly with ancient history, because we don't really know nearly as much as we'd like to. My son is a historian studying the nineteenth century and has the opposite problem: there's so much documentation, he could go on researching a five-year period all his life and never read all the material.

But once you've read Josephus, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo, the New Testament, and a smattering of other texts, you've read almost all the primary sources about first-century Judaism and Christianity. It's like connect-the-dots. The more dots, and the closer they are together, the less a child can improvise. But if you're trying to draw a picture of someone and you've only got four dots, people may connect them quite differently.

Of course, when scholars do not connect the dots right in studying the historical Jesus, they can end up with some strange pictures of Jesus.

Do the apocryphal gospels shed any light on Jesus' life?

Though the apocryphal gospels can get fanciful, I don't believe everything in them must be wrong. Some material may well go back to Jesus himself.

For example, in the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says, "[The kingdom] will not come by watching for it. It will not be said, 'Look, here!' or 'Look, there!' Rather, the Father's kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people don't see it." It doesn't occur in exactly the same form in the canonical Gospels, but I have no trouble believing Jesus could have said that sort of thing.

What has been the biggest temptation and challenge you face as a Christian scholar studying Jesus?

To assume I know what the text says, usually something that affirms my Christian tradition. Theologians often say, "What Jesus really meant was … " and then follow with something that Luther or some twentieth-century theologian said. You have to ask why Jesus used his words instead of those that later theologians use.

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