I am not a biblical scholar but a writer who grew up Catholic, attended Catholic schools until the fourth grade, and did a stint as an altar boy before leaving the church in my teens. Although I never returned to organized religion, my early religious experience has stayed with me, whether I like it or not. Historical Jesus work first caught my attention because of its coolly rational perspective. Here, I thought, was a group of intelligent people taking a hard, critical look at a story that is usually approached with pie-eyed piety. Maybe they would cut through the cant and locate the “real” story: maybe they would finally kill Jesus for me.
Of course, they didn’t. As I immersed myself in the subject, I realized that many of these people were ministers or priests as well as authorities in ancient history. Far from trying to undo Christianity, many of them were working toward a new definition of it. They were hoping to make a set of very ancient beliefs digestible to a modern mind so that the seeds of wisdom locked within them could take root. To their way of thinking, they were attempting to save Christianity from the choking clutch of literalness.
This aspect of the work is what seems to account for the remarkable popular interest in the topic. Dense, jargon-packed scholarly books on the subject make bestseller lists. When experts appear on radio call-in shows the phones light up. There are ministers of all denominations who say they have felt a burden lifted from their shoulders by this approach to the gospels, and they are suddenly offering their congregations an entirely new Jesus.