When David Friedrich Strauss’ The Life of Jesus critically examined was published in 1835, it caused a storm of controversy. His contemporaries had limited non-literal interpretations of the scriptures to the Old Testament; Strauss dared to apply critical criteria to the New Testament. Crediting "myth" with a positive value, he sought to distinguish between "evangelical myth" and reports of historical events in the gospels.

Strauss is one of a handful of figures credited with the establishment of historical Jesus scholarship, though "The Quest for the Historical Jesus" owes its appelation to a later scholar, Albert Schweitzer. Strauss' attempt to draw distinctions within the gospel narratives relied on the a priori assumption that these accounts are not purely historical documents. While his contemporaries argued over rational and supernatural explanations for miraculous events, Strauss made both explanations seem tenuous and irrational. His hypothesis that gospel material was not intended as straightforward history soon became the consensus – the question of what was myth and what was history remained.

The original 'Jesus Quest' was dismissed as over-optimistic and open to the interpreter's whim. Influential theologians in the early twentieth-century (Barth, Bultmann) suspected that 'the real Jesus' was impossible to uncover. They concentrated instead on Form Criticism - breaking down the gospels into distinct passages and seeking to discern their original setting within the early christian community.

But the quest was revived. New material (the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nag Hammadi library) fresh enthusiasm, and radical answers have ensured its vigorous pursuit. And although in the past 170 years much has changed, one element has remained constant: our interest in the life of Jesus.

It was a spate of populist revelationary accounts of Jesus’ life in the early 1990s that provoked Tom Wright’s recently reissued Who Was Jesus? The book’s introduction provides a brief and accessible summary of different phases in the quest for the historical Jesus. Rich in metaphor, his description of the Schweitzer's contribution as a one man riot in a portrait gallery (not his precise words) brings to life the disruptive and radical qualities of each scholar's interpretation.

Wright debunks Barbara Thiering’s sensational ‘decoding’ of the gospels, and dismisses John Spong whose account of Jesus' birth was flawed by a complete misunderstanding of midrash. He offers a strong sane critique of A N Wilson’s "pale distortion" of the historical Jesus, whose best points are borrowed and stuck together without sufficient attention to the full breadth of scholarship (in particular E P Sander's excellent account of Paul).

More than a decade after its first publication, even Wright’s own interpretation of the life of Jesus with which the book concludes, remains a worthy read. Who was Jesus? is the ideal choice for anyone who wants to understand the debate and the scholarly consensus without tackling academic texts.

The late Carsten Peter Thiede picked up again that controversial word, myth. His last book, Jesus, Man or Myth? relies heavily on the negative connotation of myth as false, a connotation of which Wright is rightly wary. But Wright would not disagree with Thiede’s essential point, that "The Jesus of history and the Christ of faith are two inseparable sides of the same coin."

Jesus, Man or Myth? is structured around questions: Did Jesus really exist? How do we know the stories about Jesus are true? Did Jesus really do miracles? The answers are a good combination of light scholarship and rhetoric, but sadly let down by one or two questionable points:

In the first chapter, for example, Thiede puts weight on the assertion that women could not testify, arguing that by consequence the evangelists’ mention of women at the empty tomb must be historical (because no one would invent such witnesses). However Richard Bauman, among others, conclusively demonstrated from contemporary sources that women could testify (Bauman, "Women in Law," Women and Politics in Ancient Rome (1992): pp. 45-52. contra Thiede pp. 22-3).

Despite this shortcoming, the book is a compelling read, and the question which underpins the book ‘Is it more reasonable to think otherwise?’ retains its force.

Geza Vermes’ latest offering, The Passion, has already proved popular. For those shaken by Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ and the controversy surrounding it Vermes offers the comfort of sound scholarship. The book, as the title anticipates, is an examination of the passion narratives, searching for the underlying historical truth. That such a search is needed, is clear:

"like everything else we know about Jesus, the account of his last day derives from the New Testament, and more specifically from the narratives of the four Gospels. Unlike the traditional story produced by the Church, they are neither simple nor coherent… Without a deliberate and artificial harmonization… they seem disconcerting and confusing."

Like a lawyer before the court Vermes carefully defines, evaluates and interprets the available evidence to find out where the "real history" is lurking. Already an established expert in the field, Vermes offers a fascinating and convincing account of when, how and why Jesus died, according to the gospels.

The most recent contribution to the field of Jesus scholarship is James Dunn’s A New Perspective on Jesus. Like Thiede, Dunn emphasises faith, but his goal is not to persuade the reader to believe. It is rather a corrective to the efforts of contemporary ‘questers’. To seek, as Robert Funk and other Jesus Seminar scholars do, for history in the Gospels without valuing the faith which brought them into being is as Dunn demonstrates a nonsense. Dismissing as unhistorical events simply because they cohere ‘too’ closely with the expectations of the faithful is a flawed enterprise.

Dunn convincingly identifies other failures in the approach of contemporary New Testament scholars. The desire to uncover a distinctive Jesus, somehow at odds with his environment, has fed into weird and wonderful portraits built on selective fragments of evidence. The results vary wildly and bear little semblance of likely reality. This criticism is not wholly new - indeed it resembles the critique with which Schweitzer effectively derailed the original quest (on which see Wright or Dunn's own introduction). But Dunn is right to advocate an alternative: good scholarship would do better to concentrate as he suggests on continuous emphases rather than atomistic data.

Dunn has deliberately set out to show what has been missing from the quest. The most stimulating of his three criticisms is that of scholarly reliance on the 'default setting'. Scholars appear to be incapable of thinking outside the "literary paradigm". The acknowledgement that the earliest gospel traditions were oral rather than literary is a commonplace, but scholars continue to attempt to explain the variations within the gospel narratives solely by recourse to ‘document’ theories. It is time to reimagine oral culture.

Now if oral transmission is once taken seriously the puzzle – the ‘source’ of agreements and variations not easily explained within the two-document hypothesis (which Dunn largely accepts) dissolves. It is the insistence on thinking in terms of documentary dependence, layers and written editions of gospel sources that creates the puzzle. Oral sources are multiple and diverse, fixed and yet also flexible. If the first accounts were indeed oral, then the truth is simple: "We can speak of an originating event, but we should certainly hesitate before speaking of an original tradition of the event." [97]

If Dunn's critique receives the attention due - and it should - it will bring a much needed breath of fresh air to the ongoing quest for the historical Jesus.

It is often only the most grotesque (and least respectable) of the quest's portraits that capture the secular imagination. But at its best the quest is a task which desires to locate Jesus within his first-century Jewish context, and through that to make both historical - and where applicable - theological sense of his impact. This is a task which Dunn, Vermes, Thiede and Wright each undertake in different, respectable and highly stimulating ways.