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Overviews of Jesus scholarship are hardly new. McClymond notes the most famous author in this genre was Albert Schweitzer, the German physician who wrote The Quest of the Historical Jesus. It was a depth charge of a book whose impact still reverberates among Jesus scholars. The physician ridiculed attempts to reconstruct Jesus as an enlightened liberal and forcefully pressed the case that these academics often view Jesus through the narrow lenses of their own concerns.

If scholars thought there was no such thing as divine intervention, Schweitzer argued, then Jesus was just one smart cookie who was misunderstood. If a professor had a strict religious upbringing that he was trying to live down, then Jesus was some kind of ancient hippie, and all that fire-and-brimstone stuff was a product of the conflict between the religious authorities and the early church.

No one would accuse Schweitzer of fashioning a mirror-image Jesus with his failed apocalyptic prophet of doom. Nor have all modern scholars projected themselves onto Jesus. But they have looked at the same data, with some supplemental material thrown in, and come up with different reconstructions: from Jesus the Torah-observant rabbi to Jesus the magician to Jesus the cynical, wisdom-spouting sage. As McClymond deftly puts it, "The scholars' reconstructions are balanced as delicately as an artist's mobile: touch one piece and all the rest tremble in their places."

McClymond is a theologian and not a text critic or a language scholar, so he is inclined to pull strands of information together, rather than apart. He challenges the sometimes narrow field of biblical studies by insisting that the distinctions that seem so important for conference papers and journal articles are not significant for helping most Christians to understand the life and message of Jesus of Nazareth.

Yes, Jesus was a teacher of Jewish wisdom, the author says, but he also warned that the end would come, and many would be caught unawares. He was kind, but he was also "a totalitarian," insisting that he was the one true path to God the Father.

In contrast to what McClymond calls the "family values Jesus" of modern evangelicalism, the author issues some "hard sayings" of his own in the final chapter. The two most stinging are "Jesus sided with the poor"—which might call for some family sacrifices—and "Jesus was a home wrecker" (recall his warning that following him would bring division). McClymond's own all-too-brief portrayal of Jesus is what the kids in Narnia would have called "not a tame lion."

To make their cases for a kinder, gentler Jesus, modern scholars must exclude large chunks of Jesus' teachings. McClymond argues that most proposals to exclude whole classes of Jesus' statements simply won't work. He gives two reasons. First, we don't know enough about the composition histories of the Gospels to do this with any degree of confidence. Second, it reeks of cherry-picking.

If the reader decides to look for a certain predetermined Jesus and to exclude all contrary evidence, McClymond says, then she will find what she's looking for—but probably miss the guy who changed the world, and overcame it.

Jeremy Lott is the foreign-press critic for GetReligion.org.

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February 2005, Vol. 49, No. 2