Kingdom, Cross, and Crucible: Part Seven

From Joseph Smith to Jesus: A Historical Reckoning

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Part Seven: The Truth, The Whole Truth

Finally, I offer my honest personal accounting of what remains after the crucible of historical-critical method is applied to Jesus and the religion(s) inspired by him. There are both costs and gains to applying the historical discipline, but here I expound why I remain a student of a tradition I can no longer believe in literally.

I. William Law’s Standard
II. The Method and Its Limits
III. Gratitude for My Faith Heritage
IV. The Figure Who Emerges
V. Costs and Gains

VI. Personal Conclusions

 

Continued from Part 6. 

I. William Law’s Standard

William Law was a man who loved what he had given his life to. He was a counselor in the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, one of the most trusted men in Nauvoo, a genuine believer in the early LDS restoration project. When his commitment to honesty finally exceeded his capacity to remain silent on what he had witnessed in Nauvoo, he published that the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth was owed to the people who had given their lives, their families, their resources, and their trust to an institution that was dishonestly managing what they were permitted to know.

I originally borrowed his formulation from the Nauvoo Expositor for the tagline of this blog because it captured exactly what my Mormon deconstruction project required: the specific and demanding discipline of saying what is actually true even when the institution and the community and the people you love would prefer that you did not. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

What I have come to understand, in the years since, is that the formulation contains within it a tension that I feel with increasing clarity the further I travel from the certainties I began with. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is a legal oath – a commitment to full disclosure, to the absence of deliberate concealment. It is a standard of honesty. But that standard provides no inherent guarantee of access. You can be fully committed to telling the truth and still be working with incomplete information, limited tools, and a mind shaped by a specific history and a specific set of concerns. The commitment to honesty and the possession of “Truth” with a capital T are different things. I have spent years learning to hold both of those realities simultaneously, and I will spend the rest of my life continuing on that path.

That tension runs throughout this entire series. The historical-critical method recovers a probable past from fragmentary evidence. The tradition that grew around that past did something different: it built meaning as a first priority. It constructed powerful myths – in the deepest and most human sense of that word – around a historical kernel that mattered so much to the people who embraced it that they couldn’t leave it uninterpreted. My own interpretation of the difference between the recoverable history and the post-hoc meaning the tradition constructed around it is the work this final post undertakes.

II. The Method and Its Limits

The historical-critical method is genuinely powerful; it is the primary intellectual tool this series has deployed across six posts. It has transformed our understanding of antiquity, of the biblical tradition, and of the figures who populate it. It has made dishonest readings of those texts much harder to sustain by apologists, at least for anyone willing to engage the discipline seriously. I have no regrets about picking it up and learning to use it. It is the same methodology that dismantled LDS truth claims for me, and applying it to the broader Christian tradition is both intellectually consistent and, frankly, inevitable once you understand the method’s utility.

I wish to be equally clear about what the method has delivered and where it reaches its limits. Historical-critical scholarship is a tool for recovering probable pasts from fragmentary evidence. As we have seen, it operates under genuine constraints – the limitations of the surviving documentary record, the interpretive frameworks scholars inevitably bring to the material, the ongoing debates within the field that the footnotes of any serious work in this tradition will make abundantly visible. The scholars I have drawn on throughout this series (i.e., Schweitzer, Ehrman, Crossan, Borg, Sanders, Wright, Allison, Kloppenborg, Pagels) do not all agree with each other. In some cases, they disagree substantially about matters that are far from peripheral. The field is alive because the questions are honesly hard and the evidence is definitely incomplete.

The reconstruction I have offered across these posts is my own synthesis, grounded in the best expertise I have been able to find and shaped by my own moral and philosophical judgment about what the evidence supports. It is open to revision. There is no view from nowhere available to me or to anyone else. What I can say is that the gist of the picture – the documentary trajectory, the political nature of Jesus’s ministry and death, the meaning-making response of the earliest community, the extraordinary diversity of early Christianity before proto-orthodoxy imposed its retrospective unity – is broadly shared among careful scholars across a wide range of theological backgrounds and commitments. The details remain contested but the outline is reasonably clear.

There is one more thing worth saying about the limits, and it connects back to something I named at the very beginning of the series. The writing of this series is itself a microcosm of the problem it examines. My process of selecting, summarizing, and synthesizing the expert scholarship is an interpretive act subject to all the same distortions and commitments that shape every other layer of the tradition. The Schweitzer problem – finding in the past a reflection of your own concerns – is managed but never fully solved. What I hope the series demonstrates is that the problem can be inhabited with enough self-awareness that the interpretation remains open to revision rather than hardening into a new orthodoxy. At first, I experienced a great deal of cognitive dissonance with the uncertainty introduced in accepting the historical method. Yet even if we accept that perfect objectivity is a practical impossibility, I still believe the pursuit of objective truth is a worthwhile human endeavor. This picture is the best I can construct currently. The tension between confidence and uncertainty is something I have made my peace with carrying.

In short, I have a calibrated confidence that the method gives us a recovered figure. The tradition gives us a mythologized one. The next two sections address what each of those has meant to me before I offer my summary of what the method actually yields.

III. Gratitude for My Faith Heritage

I am grateful for Mormonism, but I want to be careful about what I mean by that. I am clear-eyed about the institutional dishonesty – the suppression of information, the white-washing of inconvenient history, the way the LDS organization used the mechanisms of community and belonging and eternal consequence to make it costly for its members to ask valid questions that needed asking. That did (and still does) real damage to real people, including people I love, and I have no interest in hedging there.

Rather, my gratitude for my faith heritage is toward a seeker strain within early Mormon thought that the tradition itself never lived up to. Joseph Smith articulated this principle (which he himself failed to fully embrace) most succinctly: “One of the grand fundamental principles of Mormonism is to receive truth, let it come from whence it may” (HC 5:498). The thirteenth Article of Faith encodes the same impulse in the tradition's own public confession: a commitment to being honest, true, and benevolent, to hoping and enduring, and ultimately, to seeking out whatever is virtuous, lovely, or of good report, wherever such things are found. D&C 88 issues the same charge in the idiom of revelation: “As all have not faith, seek ye diligently and teach one another words of wisdom; yea, seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith” (118). I took these injunctions seriously. Read literally, they authorize exactly the kind of inquiry that destroyed my faith in the institution that produced them. I followed them past the borders that Mormonism permits. What I found on the other side is the journey of discovery this series documents.

While the deconstruction this principle led to was a painful, disorienting, and often isolating experience of having one’s framework collapse and having to rebuild something new from what remained – it gifted me things I couldn’t have gotten in any other way. It led to my learning how to read primary sources. It taught me to ask important questions about provenance: what is the earliest extant form of a document, who wrote this document, for whom, under what pressures, and with what agenda. It taught me to recognize the fingerprints of institutional self-protection and retroactive revision. It taught me to sit with uncertainty without immediately reaching for a replacement certainty to fill the void. In the wreckage of a specific set of truth claims, it gave me something more durable than those claims had ever been: an awareness of methodology and epistemology, a set of intellectual habits, a practiced tolerance for the discomfort of imperfect knowledge. It proffered the discovery that uncertainty, honestly inhabited, allows a more grounded place to live and to learn and to grow.

Most importantly for the present series, the Mormon deconstruction project taught me to recognize mythmaking for what it is, and to take it seriously as a human enterprise rather than merely debunking it. I watched a tradition construct itself in real time across the fourteen years of Joseph Smith’s prophetic career: the theological escalation from the Book of Mormon’s quasi-modalism to the King Follett discourse’s henotheism, the retroactive revision of the D&C manuscripts, the progressive elaboration of founding claims across successive documents. That was mythmaking in motion. The founding figure was building meaning around himself, his community, and a set of experiences that mattered enormously to them; and the meaning they built was layered, developmental, and shaped at every stage by the codependent needs of the prophet-community relationship. Scrutinizing that process in a tradition where the documentary evidence is abundant and recent is what prepared me to see the same processes at work in the far more fragmentary and ancient evidence of the Christian tradition.

Mormonism was my training ground. I am glad for the tools the deconstruction forced me to develop, and for the recognition that mythmaking is what communities do with the figures who matter most to them. Joseph Smith was the laboratory that enabled me to properly adjudicate the field work on the historical Jesus of Nazareth.

IV. The Figure Who Emerges

Every tradition mythologizes its founders. This is a descriptive observation. The communities that form around extraordinary figures cannot leave those figures uninterpreted. They elevate, elaborate, and adapt. They project later convictions backward onto earlier events. They construct narratives that make the founder’s life legible in terms that serve the community’s evolving needs. The myth is the measure of how much the figure mattered – the scale of the meaning-making is proportional to the scale of original impact.

As we have seen, the Christian tradition’s mythmaking followed a trajectory this series has traced across five central posts. A Galilean prophet who announced the Kingdom of God and enacted its values in his practice became, within decades of his death, the subject of an extraordinary escalation of theological claims. Paul, writing twenty years after the crucifixion, already proclaims a cosmic Christ – a pre-existent angelic figure whose death accomplishes a soteriological purpose and whose resurrection inaugurates a new age. Another twenty years later, Mark presents a human, urgent, morally forceful Jesus who is progressively revealed as the messianic Son of God. Matthew and Luke add miraculous birth narratives, pushing the divine identity backward from the baptism to the moment of conception. John pushes the trajectory to its zenith: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (1:1). The pre-existent Logos, the cosmic principle through whom the universe was created, descends into flesh and walks through the narrative with the serene foreknowledge of someone who has always known exactly who he is and what his death will accomplish.

This is mythmaking of the highest order. In scholastic terms, that is no denigrating label. The academic category of myth, properly understood, is a functional term of human culture rather than dismissal. Myths are the stories communities tell to make sense of the experiences that matter most to them. They are meaning-making vehicles. They take the raw material of human experience and historical memory, and shape it into narratives that carry the community’s deepest convictions about what the world is and how it should be inhabited. The birth narratives of Matthew and Luke are myths. The “I am” sayings of John’s Jesus are legendary. The resurrection narratives that grow more spectacular from Paul’s bare creedal formula through Mark’s empty tomb through Matthew’s earthquake and angel through Luke’s extended appearance stories through John’s Thomas touching the wounds – that escalating sequence is mythological. It is clearly visible in the documents themselves, with each layer variously reflecting the framework of convictions and concerns of the community that produced it.

To call these myths is to say something precise: they are the tradition’s interpretation of a historical figure, constructed after the fact to meet the needs of evolving communities, shaped by theological conviction and liturgical practice and the pressures of a movement defining itself against both Second Temple Judaism and first-century Rome. They are the natural human response to a figure whose life and death demanded an explanation commensurate with what his followers had experienced in his loss. They are integral to the community-building enterprise that turned a scattered collection of traumatized disciples into a flurry of movements that would outlast the empire that executed the prophet that inspired them.

But as the historical-critical method demonstrates, these myths are also distinguishable from the historical figure they were built around. In Part One of this series, I shared my experience of first encountering a secular approach to biblical studies in college. The primary textbook for that class was Bart Ehrman’s The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (2007). It was in response to one of the end-of-chapter homework assignments that I confessed that reading Jesus through the lens of Jewish apocalypticism, at the time, felt harmfully reductive:

“Understanding Jesus Christ in this context lessens his character, his words, and his actions in my opinion. The author makes a case for Jesus being almost exclusively apocalyptic because of his ‘beginning and ending makes the middle’ logic. The fact that Jesus went to John, a noted Jewish apocalypticist, to be baptized confirms his support in the belief. The fact that the Roman government crucified Jesus for his doctrine that God would soon visit the Jews’ enemies also seems to support the author’s logic. In addition, the incident at the temple supports the apocalyptic creed when supplemented by his apocalyptic teachings and sayings found in Q, M, Mark, and L (all independent sources). Thus, they allow us to ignore his other teachings about salvation and being the son of God and strip him down to the bare minimum – a Jewish prophet.”

In hindsight, I fully understand why that framing felt like a diminishment. It threatened something I was psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually invested in. But the years of study and reckoning that eventually produced this series, coupled with my personal life experiences, have reversed that judgment entirely. The historical Jesus who survives the crucible of the historical-critical method is more compelling, more grounded, and more recognizably human than the cosmic Christ who eventually swallowed him whole. The legend became a religion. But I find the man far more compelling, and recovering him – however partially, however tentatively – was worth the cost of losing the legend.

An apocalyptic Jewish prophet from Roman-occupied Galilee, formed in the movement of John the Baptizer, who revised his inherited apocalypticism in the direction of participatory enactment – who insisted that the coming Kingdom was to be enacted, in the present, through specific practices of radical inclusion and distributive justice. A teacher whose parables were carefully constructed provocations designed to expose and disrupt the cultural assumptions that maintained existing hierarchies of power, worth, and belonging. A healer who restored the excluded to community. A practitioner of radical table fellowship who made his table a parable of the Kingdom’s social order. A political dissident who entered Jerusalem on a donkey as a deliberate counter-procession to Pilate’s warhorse, who overturned the tables of the Rome-Temple economic nexus as a prophetic sign act, who proclaimed the basileia of God as a direct counter-claim to the basileia of Caesar, and who was executed by Rome for that proclamation. That, to me, is a remarkable and tragic figure of history.

The ethical weight of that figure increases when the myth is understood as myth. A divine Jesus, one who knew from eternity who he was and what his death would accomplish and who descended into humanity fully equipped with foreknowledge of the resurrection, is a figure whose sacrifice (however moving) carries a different moral weight than that of a human being who made choices under conditions of genuine uncertainty and risk. The human Jesus walked the road of non-violent resistance without knowing how it would end. He broke bread with “sinners” without a guarantee of vindication. He confronted the exploitative collaboration of religion and state power. The myth made him a God. The history reconstructs him as something in certain ways more extraordinary: a socio-political Jewish prophet who embodied what he proclaimed at the ultimate cost, with no safety net the tradition would later construct beneath him.

The myth and the history are both worth understanding. The myth tells us what the early communities needed, built, and believed. The history helps us distinguish what they were building around. This series has been an attempt to distinguish between them carefully; to honor the mythologization as the deeply human enterprise it is, while insisting that the historical figure beneath it is at least partially recoverable, consequential, and capable of making demands on anyone willing to take him seriously – provocative demands that predate the myth and survive it in spite of it.

V. Costs and Gains

A strict historical reading of Jesus and Christian origins costs the supernatural apparatus of literal miracles and resurrection. Of guaranteed providential intentionality in the development of Christianity instead of historical contingency. We lose the empty tomb, the wounds that can be touched, the fish that can be eaten. The reversal of worldly injustice to the innocent. For many people, that loss is decisive, and I understand why believers must resist it at all costs. If the resurrection did not happen in the literal bodily sense, then a central claim of the tradition as most people have received it fails and their own hope for eventual bodily resurrection falters. I have no desire to minimize that.

However, what it preserves is something that I think is in some ways more demanding and more serious. Marcus Borg argues in Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time (1994) that if the resurrection is understood as parable rather than as reportage – as the community's Emmaus account of how the vision of Jesus persisted and what sustained it – then its meaning is not safely deposited in a past event that should either be believed in or disbelieved. It is a present claim about a practice that invites the spirit of the historical Jesus’s program and mission presently. In this reading, the resurrection of Jesus is more than something that happened to Jesus. It is something that can happen repeatedly in the community that enduringly enacts the practices he taught and embodied. It offers spiritual continuity with his socio-political program of resistance to the domination systems here in the present.

The empirical materialist position I described in the first post matters here in a way I want to make explicit. I am not claiming that the Emmaus reading is merely a consoling fiction – a way of preserving the emotional warmth of the resurrection story while quietly abandoning its substance. That would be the assertion of a strict reductionist who feels guilty about the abandonment and tries to soften it with metaphor. My position is different: I genuinely do not know the full range of what the physical world contains or what human consciousness is capable of. The epistemological commitments I have acknowledged openly from the start hold that the natural order cannot be suspended by a divine agent standing outside it, because there is no such outside (as per Spinoza). Hume's argument establishes that no testimony can overturn the accumulated weight of physical regularity. Neither argument requires the conclusion that the disciples' experienced nothing, or that the category of the sacred is materially empty, or that the persistence of a justice vision through the worst that empire could do carries no significance beyond the merely sociological. Those are different claims, and they are not ones that my epistemological paradigm compels.

This is where I find the scholarship of Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan – unorthodox yet believing scholars – to be their most compelling and honest. Critics have accused them of trying to save the resurrection by spiritualizing it into meaninglessness. To the contrary, and I find the it persuasive, they are arguing that the literal reading actually drains the resurrection of its deepest significance by locating it in a past event that either happened or did not, rather than in an ongoing practice that either is or is not being enacted by believers. A Jesus who was physically raised from the dead two thousand years ago and now sits at the right hand of God waiting for an eternally deferred Parousia is a Jesus totally evacuated of the historical figure’s call to a participatory eschaton. It is easier to believe and wait for action from that cosmic Christ than to participate in a parabolic resurrection that requires active participation now – in the welcome of the stranger, in the loving of one’s enemies, in the breaking of bread with the excluded, in the persistent refusal to accept that the Kingdom of distributive justice and radical inclusion is some far-off actualization of simple intellectual belief. The first version requires a metaphysical commitment; the second requires active practice.

Personally, I do not believe it probable that Jesus was physically raised from the dead. The Humean standard is clear on that, and I try to apply it consistently. Having spent years working through this material honestly, I am nevertheless genuinely moved by the Emmaus story; by what it says about grief and recognition and the way a vision persists in the practices of those who carry it. Those two things are not in contradiction. The first is an epistemological position. The second is a response to genuine human experience encoded in a story that tells the truth about something real, even if it does not tell it in the register of historical reportage. The disciples on the road were walking away from Jerusalem in defeat. They found, somewhere on that road, in the wrestling with scripture and in the opening of the table to strangers, a reason to turn around. In fact, that is the central claim the tradition embedded very early on – dressed in the language of physical miracle, but pointing at something that does not require the miracle to be real in order for the pointing to matter. Students of Jesus may or may not accept the Humean standard as I do, but my argument is that the critical part of discipleship is acceptance of the Kingdom program encoded in the metaphorical Emmaus story.

As I argued in Part Five, the persistence of the vision of Jesus can be two things at once: the community's experience of his continued presence, the visions that shattered grief into proclamation, the practices through which he was encountered again at table and in scripture. Or as the persistence of his socio-political Kingdom program enacted first in Galilee, the distributive justice he embodied against the retributive logic of Roman imperial order, the insistence that a different organizing principle for human community was possible and imminent if we would follow him on the Way. These are not two separate things that happen to share a phrase. I believe those first shattering weeks in and around Jerusalem eventually carried both registers simultaneously, even if subsequent development in the tradition worked to literalize the former and spiritualize the latter.

VI. Personal Conclusions

The figure who emerges from the historical reconstruction issues a specific challenge, and it is a challenge that applies perfectly well with the present in my judgment.

Jesus of Nazareth lived in a world organized by what John Dominic Crossan has called the “normalcy of civilization” – the assumption, so deeply embedded in the structures of daily life as to be functionally opaque to some, that the way things are is the way things must be. That the extraction of wealth from the many by the few is simply how economies work. That military violence is the natural and necessary instrument of political order. That the hierarchies of value that determine who eats and who goes hungry, who is honored and who is expendable, who belongs and who is outsider, are features of reality rather than choices made by people with the power to make them differently. The assumption is perfectly rational because these conditions recur repeatedly throughout the history of human civilization.

Rome was the normalcy of civilization in perhaps its most fully realized form in antiquity. Its roads, its legions, its tax collectors, its client kings, its crucifixions – these were the infrastructure of an order that presented itself as permanent, inevitable, divinely sanctioned. The Pax Romana was peace on Rome’s terms, maintained by Rome’s violence, serving Rome’s interests. And the genius of the system was that it made its own brutality seem like the natural condition of the world rather than a political arrangement that benefited specific people at the expense of others.

Everything this series has reconstructed about Jesus’s ministry is a confrontation with that normalcy. The parables exposed it. The open table defied it. The healings reversed its consequences. The Kingdom proclamation named an alternative to it. The entry into Jerusalem on a donkey lampooned it. The Temple action challenged the economic machinery that connected it to the religious establishment. And the crucifixion was the normalcy of civilization’s definitive response to anyone who threatened to make its contingency visible – who dared to suggest that the way things are is a choice, and that there is always an alternative social order on offer.

What I do with the recovered Jesus is take that challenge seriously as a challenge addressed to my own world. The normalcy of civilization did not end with Rome. The specific arrangements have evolved but the underlying logic hasn’t. The assumption that economic extraction is natural, that military violence is necessary, that hierarchies of human value are inevitable, that the existing distribution of power and comfort and security reflects something deeper than the preferences of those who benefit from it. That assumption is as operational in the twenty-first century as it was in the first. The infrastructure looks different. The logic is the same.

The recovered Jesus invites participation in resistance to that normalcy. And the resistance he modeled was specific: it was nonviolent. He enacted the alternative rather than attacking the existing order by its own methods. The open table, the inclusive community, the redistribution of access to God’s presence from the Temple’s controlled economy to the open countryside, the refusal to recognize Caesar’s claims as ultimate – these were acts of nonviolent confrontation with the deepest assumptions of the imperial order. They were political in the most fundamental sense: they enacted a different arrangement of human relationships and invited others to join it. That invitation still stands to students of the historical Jesus, whether or not one chooses to believe in a literal resurrection. Regardless of one’s opinions on the meaning of the empty tomb, it requires attention to who is at the table and who has been excluded. It requires asking whose labor sustains the comfort of the comfortable. It requires the willingness to name the Legion, viz. to identify the structures of violent control that present themselves as natural and permanent while destroying identity within human community. It demands resistance to those structures through practices that embody the alternative rather than replicating the violence they oppose.

I am a secular humanist. I hold no theological convictions about Jesus’s divine identity or cosmic significance. The supernatural apparatus the tradition erected around him does not survive the historical examination my series has conducted. And I do not personally place any confidence in an apocalyptic eschaton by divine intervention. All the same, I accept the challenge of Jesus’s Kingdom program as a worthy ambition for human civilization in all of the categories that matter for human well-being. As a student of the historical figure, I accept as exemplar the man who looked at the most powerful empire of his era, saw its violence and its extractive logic for what they were, and enacted a specific, embodied, costly alternative. One doesn’t need a settled theology to act on what the historical figure actually taught. You do not need a resurrection to practice the open table. This alternative framework is the thing the historical reconstruction recovers that I find most consequential and motivating.

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Series Recommended Reading

The following is a selection of the works most essential to the argument of the series as a whole – a roadmap through the intellectual journey that produced this series. Recommended reading for individual parts appears at the end of each installment.

Albert Schweitzer. The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906). Adam & Charles Black.

Bart D. Ehrman and Hugo Méndez. The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, 8th ed. (2023). Oxford University Press. 

John Kloppenborg. Q, The Earliest Gospel (2000). Westminster John Knox Press.

John Dominic Crossan. The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (1991). HarperSanFrancisco.

E.P. Sanders. The Historical Figure of Jesus (1993). Penguin Press.

Dale C. Allison Jr. Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History (2010). Baker Academic.

Raymond Brown. The Death of the Messiah (1994). Doubleday.

N.T. Wright. The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003). Fortress Press.

Dale C. Allison Jr. Resurrecting Jesus: The Earliest Christian Tradition and Its Interpreters (2005). T&T Clark.

Bart D. Ehrman. How Jesus Became God (2014). HarperOne.

Erin Vearncombe, Brandon Scott, and Hal Taussig. After Jesus Before Christianity (2021). HarperOne.

Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan. The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009). HarperOne.

Paula Fredriksen. When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation (2018). Yale University Press.

Elaine Pagels. The Gnostic Gospels (1979). Random House.

John Dominic Crossan. God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now (2007). HarperSanFrancisco.

Marcus Borg. Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time (1994). HarperSanFrancisco.

  

This is the final post in a seven-part series. The complete series:

Part One: From Nauvoo to Nazareth — establishing the methodology and the stakes

Part Two: Sifting the Scriptural Sediment — the nature of the New Testament sources

Part Three: Reconstructing the Man and the Mission — what scholarship actually recovers

Part Four: Christ Crucified: Jesus Politics and Rome’s Response — the political execution

Part Five: Resurrection and Atonement: The Persistence of the Vision of Jesus — the resurrection and what remains

Part Six: Christ Contested: Proliferation and Domestication — diversity, disappointment, and the making of orthodoxy

Part Seven: The Truth, The Whole Truth — the closing