This book may be regarded as a synthesis of positions which have been defended by its distinguished author from the time of his first attempt to correct the vision of Christian scholars in his monograph Jesus the Jew. As these are positions with which I can only partially concur, it will be my duty in the following review to explain at many points why his arguments fail to convince me. I hope to do this in a manner that will be profitable to scholars who share the same interest; it will never be my intention to suggest that I or any other scholar could have written a study of the historical Jesus and the beginnings of Christianity that would not be equally open to debate.

We may begin where Vermes begins, with the thesis that Jesus was untypical only in a way that was...