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There were 17,249 books about Jesus in the Library of Congress as of 2004, and their number, as this essay attests, continues to climb. Who do people say the Son of Man is?

It may well be that these thousands of pages have only intensified our longing for viva vox, the living voice. It is a voice that cuts through our misery and darkness, our pluralizing cacophony—even, yes, our screens and reams of print—with the authority and exuberance of Life itself. Amid the din of our age, we listen and we wait for the voice of life.

Viva vox was actually a byword for historians in the ancient world. When given a choice, they opted for eyewitnesses over written sources. They strongly preferred relying on those whose hands had touched and ears had heard critical parts of the stories they were intent on preserving. They fought to get the story right, and so do we.

That's the better part of what these Jesus books are about: The stakes, it nearly goes without saying, could hardly be higher. "If he did what he said, then it's nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow him." So spoke Flannery O'Connor's tortured, violent Misfit in A Good Man Is Hard to Find. It's wisdom that can't be topped.

Given this daunting imperative, it's fortunate that we do a lot of history these days; indeed, in some ways we in the West are more attuned to history than ever. With the post-Christian, postmodern collapse of visions of universal morality and of soaring metanarratives that explain our world to us from some authoritative vantage, we're left with mere history, with the highly particular, often idiosyncratic, mainly muddled world of everyday human experience: fraying families, oppressive principalities, the occasional sparkle of nobility and grace in some movement or person or place. As we've spun farther away from our Christian identity and framework, we've found the need, paradoxically, to reckon with our past—past foundations, past authorities, past ideals.

So in these fracturing United States we turn, stomachs churning, to Jesus of Nazareth, he whom the historian Richard Wightman Fox, in his book Jesus in America (HarperSanFrancisco), calls our "single most important cultural hero." And we turn from different ways and diverging angles. Marcus Borg, for one, takes the Jesus Seminar to the masses in Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary (HarperSanFrancisco). Offering us a "Jesus we have never really met" (at least according to the dust jacket), he, Oxford-trained and -tested, warns against a "belief-centered" approach to the faith—even as he confesses his own cardinal beliefs: that "the pre-Easter Jesus was not God"; that Christ did not perform certain miracles in the Gospels because accounts of them "violate our sense of the limits of the spectacular"; that "the Bible and the Gospels (like the sacred scriptures of other religions) are human responses to the sacred," recording "not what God says, but what our spiritual ancestors said."

There's not much that's original here, as Stephen Prothero makes clear in American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). In fact, many of Borg's central tenets comport nicely with the conclusions of the man Prothero deems the father of the American Jesus: Thomas Jefferson. On lonely evenings in the White House, he clipped away (literally) any hint of the supernatural from copies of the Gospels, while reverentially seeking to preserve the true identity and significance of Jesus (he called him, among other things, "the most perfect model of republicanism in the universe"). Jefferson's genealogical connection to today's Jesus Seminar, where skeptical scholars meet to cast votes on the historical authenticity of the Gospels, couldn't be clearer. "Its method is democratic, its goal is freedom, and its obsession is Jesus," Prothero notes.

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June 2007, Vol. 51, No. 6