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Second, we can be reminded of what one scholar long called "the peril of modernizing Jesus." "Nothing ages faster than relevance," Meier wisely notes. "The 'cutting edge' of scholarship at any given moment often turns out to be the sharp cliff of Gerasa, off of which academic lemmings keep hurling themselves." Regarding the vexed question of Jesus' understanding of the kingdom of God, Meier asserts that "the question must be resolved not by what strikes us moderns as a priori likely but by what Jesus himself said and did." He concedes and laments that some of his fellow scholars seem to be "ruled more by the laws of Madison Avenue than by the laws of evidence." It is salutary to be reminded of the danger of domesticating Jesus. This happens when our convictions blind us to what the New Testament texts are actually trying to convey. And it is not only scholars who are plagued by this tendency.

Third, Meier decisively lays to rest the tired claim that no intellectually responsible person can believe in miracles. Only 6 percent of Americans polled by Gallup disagree completely with the statement that "Even today, miracles are performed by the power of God." In response to Bultmann's well-known assertion that it is impossible to turn on a light switch "and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of … miracles," Meier writes: "A more plausible conclusion is that only 6 percent of Americans share the mind-set of some German university professors."

Meier also convincingly shows that Jesus was not a Cynic philosopher (Crossan), not a magician (Morton Smith), and not just a Jewish "holy man" (Vermes). Positively, sober research can justifiably conclude that Jesus was - at the historical minimum - an eschatological prophet and miracle worker who claimed to know "directly and intuitively what was God's will for his people Israel in the last days."

In this decade of a seemingly endless, sometimes crazy succession of reconstructed "historical" Jesuses, Meier's monumental tome is a sheet anchor of stability against gales of arbitrary theory, undisciplined speculation, and unsound use of sources. But Meier is not the only scholar whose recent work illustrates the value of careful attention to the ancient sources that ground our knowledge of Jesus.

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December 12 1994, Vol. 38, No. 14