Human Christ

by Charlotte Allen

The quest for the "historical" Jesus - the human figure who became Christ - has preoccupied the Christian world for centuries. Their conclusions have always revealed far more about themselves than the meaning of Jesus, and, as Charlotte Allen now shows in this book, they nearly always missed the most fundamental human reality of the man whom Christians call the Son of God: he was born of a Jewish mother into a Jewish community. The story of the search for the historical Jesus is a tour through the great and terrible ideas of modern Western civilization. The Human Christ is the first chronicle of this quest from its beginnings to the present day. In addition, Allen focuses on the huge "life-of-Christ" industry that has flourished in novels and films, revealing it to be a heady combination of piety, exotica, and even soft-core pornography. Finally, Allen explores the efforts of Jewish and Gentile scholars to locate Jesus' place in first-century Judaism, the environment in which he actual