Jens SCHRÖTER and Christine JACOBI, eds., The Jesus Handbook. Grand Rapids, Michigan: W. B. Erdmans, 2022. pp. 696. $74.99 HB. ISBN 978-0-8028-7692-8. Reviewed by Peter C. PHAN, Georgetown University, DC 20057.

Originally published in German by Mohr Siebeck under the title Jesus Handbuch and translated into English by Robert L. Brawley, this huge volume could use a subtitle to indicate its subject matter such as What Do We Know about the Historical Jesus and How Do We Know Him? Let buyers beware that it is not about Christology and soteriology, that is, a theological treatise on who Jesus is professed to be in the Christian faith and his redemptive work.

Essentially the book is a scholarly report on the quest for the historical Jesus from the eighteenth century to today. It is divided into five parts. The first introduces the Jesus quest since the age of critical philosophy and historiography and the role of “collective memory” by which the Jesus of Nazareth is “remembered” by the Christian community and which forms the foundation and source for historians’ research.  The gospels are not a neutral record of Jesus’ life and work but a faith-inspired interpretation of who Jesus is and of his saving ministry in the light of the community’s belief in his resurrection and exaltation.  The second part provides a history of the Jesus quest from antiquity to our days, focusing on the use of the historical-critical method. The third part presents the historical material available for a historical reconstruction of the Jesus of history, including Christian literary evidence, non-Christian texts, and nonliterary evidence. The fourth part, which is the longest (179-486), presents the data on the life and work of Jesus that can be gathered from the above-mentioned historical material through the use of the historical-critical method, with attention to the political and religious situations, the biographical aspects, and the public ministry of Jesus. The fifth and last part describes the Wirkungen (effects) and reception of Jesus, focusing on the resurrection and appearances of Jesus, the church’s early confessions of faith, the Christological titles, the formation of apostolic structures, the noncanonical texts in the second and third centuries, the visual representations of Jesus up to 500 CE, and the ethics based on the Sermon on the Mount.

As Dale C. Allison Jr., who wrote the Foreword, concisely notes, this book is “perhaps the best guide we now have to the current state of the academic quest for the historical Jesus” (xi). It is not the purpose of a handbook, even of massive size, as opposed to a scientific monograph, to break new ground in scholarship but to survey and report what scholars have produced so far on a particular topic. In this respect, The Jesus Handbook has achieved its purpose well. Of particular interest is its discussion of the recent attempts to view the New Testament from the perspective of “collective memory” and to view its presentation of Jesus as the “remembered Jesus.”  Hence, the emphasis on the necessity of interpretation, even for contemporary historians, in reconstructing the “remembered Jesus” and the obligation to examine whether one’s “prejudices” in the sense of prejudgments and ideological presuppositions help or hamper one’s search for the historical Jesus. In this respect, it is interesting to note that the editors place the resurrection of Jesus in the part on the Wirkungen of Jesus and not in the preceding part on the life and work of Jesus. Is the resurrection an event that occurs to Jesus in his life, about which the historical-critical method presumably can say nothing, or is it only an effect of Jesus on his disciples? Can this dichotomy be justified historically?

For those who are intimidated by the size of the handbook and its highly technical discussions of epistemology and hermeneutics, and who want to know, impatiently, what modern scholarship has discovered about the Jesus of history, I recommend Part Four, though it is the longest. They can be assured that their faith in Jesus does not rest on fiction but solid historical evidence, even though their faith in Jesus goes far beyond what the historical-critical method can yield.

In conclusion, I must register a strong disappointment with the handbook. Of the forty-eight contributors forty-two hail from Europe, the United States, and Canada, with four from South Africa and two from Israel. None comes from the other parts of Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Are there no scholars, women and men, from these three continents who have something to say about the “remembered Jesus”?