The Historical Bejeezus: What a Long, Strange Quest It's Been

Near the beginning of the twentieth century, Albert Schweitzer published a book that in English translation was entitled The Quest of the Historical Jesus. In that book, he reviewed and critiqued the many efforts that had been made to write biographies of the historical Jesus the man of flesh supposed to have been metamorphosed into the Übermensch of the gospels of the New Testament. Schweitzer considered all those attempts to have been failures and concluded, perhaps sadly, that we could never know anything for certain about the historical Jesus and that the portraits painted by the scholars reviewed were but pale reflections of the researchers themselves. Prof. Price here does for the twenty-first century what Schweitzer did for the twentieth: he updates us on the historical Jesus quest. Finding as did Schweitzer that all attempted biographies have been unconvincing and unsuccessful, he has decided it was time to include reviews of the works of Christ-myth scholars such as G.A. Wells, Earl Doherty, D.M. Murdock, Thomas L. Thompson, and Joseph Atwill. It now appears all but certain that the reason for the failure of all attempts hitherto to write a biography of a historical Jesus is simple: there was no historical Jesus.