What Thomas Jefferson Could Never Understand About Jesus

many—including the present writer—have accepted the historical challenge and sought to answer it. When we really study all the evidence for all it’s worth, it is possible to offer a historically rooted picture of Jesus that is much fuller and more positive

But what if Jesus was more intelligent than any other teacher in history? More than Stephen Hawking or Karl Marx or even the Buddha? What if he was a brilliant sage with insight into the human condition that is still, two millennia later, without parallel? What if he simply has no equal or peer?

this general thrust, of a very Jewish Jesus who was nevertheless opposed to some high-profile features of first-century Judaism, seems to me the most viable one if we are to do justice, not just to the evidence of the synoptic gospels (they, after all, are easy game for any critic who wants to avoid their implications) but more particularly to the

I am, after all, suggesting no more than that Jesus be studied like any other figure of the ancient past. Nobody grumbles at a book on Alexander the Great if, in telling the story, the author ‘harmonizes’ two or three sources; that is his or her job, to advance hypotheses which draw together the data into a coherent framework rather than leaving it

Miracles! That’s the thing, said the apologists. Jesus did miracles, so that proves he’s the divine Son of God. For many people today, the question is still framed in the old eighteenth-century way, and they feel themselves obliged to give the same eighteenth-century answers. But this is a mistake.