Preface

      A thousand years ago, the image that people had of Jesus of Nazareth was not the result of a complex challenge to their knowledge, intellect and faith but depended to a great extent on whether they were Christians or Jews. For the former, Jesus was the Son of God, born of the Virgin Mary, who was sent into the world to preach his message and to suffer crucifixion and who was resurrected on the third day after his death and then reunited with God at his right hand. For the latter, Jesus was born as a result of his mother’s illicit relations, was a brilliant student who rebelled against his teachers and used the power of the divine name to perform sorcery, for which activities he was put to death. The precise Christian theology might vary from sect to sect and the Jewish folklore could take on different forms but the essential point of controversy remained the same, namely, whether Jesus was human or divine.

      Once the seeds of modern thinking had been planted among Christians and had sprouted Protestant interpretations and humanist viewpoints, the intellectual blossoms took on a different hue. As Isabel Rivers has pointed out in the first volume of her Reason, Grace and Sentiment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991 p. 83), Edward Fowler, Bishop of Gloucester, could, in his The Design of Christianity of the 1670s, describe Jesus as the most balanced, charming and attractive of men, nothing short of a model Anglican gentleman. As the episcopal view put it,

      he was a Person of the Greatest Freedom, Affability and Courtesie, there was nothing in his Conversation that was at all Austere, Crabbed or Unpleasant. Though he was always serious, yet he was never sowr, sullenly Grave, Morose or Cynical; but of a marvellously conversable, sociable and benign temper.

      For the German orientalist, Hermann Samuel Reimarus, who died in 1768, Jesus was a Jewish political leader who attempted to rid his country of the Roman occupation and marched into Jerusalem in the hope of being proclaimed the newly anointed leader (Hebrew: mashiaḥ; English: ‘messiah’). He was put to death for his efforts, and his supporters stole and hid his body. They then explained their hero’s reverse of fortune by promoting the idea of his resurrection and a more theological notion of his messianic activity.

      One of the results of the liberation of Christians from their theological confines was, of course, the emancipation of the Jews from the narrowness of their ghettos. As a consequence of this greater freedom, intellectual Jews of the early nineteenth century in central and western Europe sought to replace their folkloristic view of Jesus with one that could occupy a more convincing place in the new Jewish history that they were composing. Both Christians and Jews were therefore at that time enthusiastically uncovering layers of legend,