Jesus Legend : A Case For The Historical Reliability Of The Synoptic Jesus (Repr

Part 1: Historical Method And The Jesus Tradition: Miracles, Parallels, And First-century Palestine

Part 2: Other Witnesses: Ancient Historians And The Apostle Paul

Part 3: Between Jesus And The Gospels: The Early Oral Jesus Tradition

Part 4: The Synoptic Gospels As Historical Sources For Jesus: Assessing The Evidence

Additional Info
Much New Testament scholarship of the last 200 years has seen fit, to one degree or another, to relegate the Jesus tradition as recorded in the Gospels to the realm of legend, i.e., to the realm of fiction. But is this really what the evidence points to? By drawing together recent scholarship from a variety of fields, including history, anthropology, ethnography, folklore, and New Testament studies, Paul Eddy and Gregory Boyd show that the evidence actually supports–rather than refutes–the historical reliability of the Gospels and the existence of Jesus.

After first presenting the cumulative case argument for the ‘legendary Jesus’ thesis, the authors proceed to dismantle it and seriously bring into question its viability. In the process, they range through issues such as the historical-critical method, form criticism, oral tradition, the use of non-Christian sources, the writings of Paul, and the Hellenization of Judaism. They come to the conclusion that the view of Jesus embraced by the early church was ‘substantially rooted in history.’ Here is an important book in the field of Jesus studies, with potential textbook use in courses in New Testament studies and apologetics.