Human Christ

Scholars, novelists and filmmakers have long tried to recover the Jesus of history, and Charlotte Allen argues that the portraits they produced mostly mirror their own era. Often overlooked, she says, is the basic fact that Jesus was a Jew, born to a Jewish mother and raised within a Jewish community.

This book traces the search from its earliest phases to the present, showing how it reflects major currents in modern Western thought. Allen also turns to the large body of life-of-Christ fiction and film, which she describes as a mixture of devotion, the exotic and, at times, softcore pornography.

Allen examines how Jewish and non-Jewish scholars have tried to place Jesus within first-century Judaism, the setting where his ministry actually took place. She contends that much of this work is closer to theology than to history, and that it reveals more about the intellectual and popular fashions of each period than about Jesus himself. Although she rejects rationalist readings of Jesus, she keeps the tools of historical research and grounds her argument in a firm acceptance of religious mystery. The book is heavily researched and fully referenced.