historical Jesus

Scholars accept two facts about Jesus with near unanimity: he was baptized, and he was crucified. Everything else - what he believed, what he taught, whether he saw himself as messiah or prophet - splits into competing reconstructions. Since the 18th century, three waves of historical inquiry have mined the Pauline epistles, the gospels, and scattered non-biblical sources to place him in context: a Galilean Jew living through messianic fever and apocalyptic expectation. Some portraits cast him as an apocalyptic prophet announcing the end times, others as a healer or social reformer preaching a moral kingdom, still others as a Cynic philosopher or rabbi. The methods clash, the conclusions diverge, but the overlapping edges suggest a man whose life bent history even as history obscures the man.