The Man in the Scarlet Robe: Two Thousand Years of Searching for Jesus

Richard C. Smith is a professor in the Department of Classics,
University of Alberta.

Michael McAteer, former religion editor for The Toronto Star, and
Michael Steinhauser, a professor of New Testament studies at the Toronto
School of Theology, have joined forces to present a historical review of
the development of the Jesus Seminar’s presentation of Jesus as a
figure of history.

After a first chapter that describes the work of the Seminar and
objections to it, the authors go on to show how the Roman world replaced
its old gods with a Jesus based primarily on the New Testament and
theology. The nature of the New Testament canon (and the presence of
other works such as the Gospel of Thomas) is noted, and a brief summary
is given of the more modern quest for a picture of Jesus—a quest that
seemed to reach an impasse when such scholars as Albert Schweitzer
concluded that Jesus’ life could be interpreted only in terms of
theology, not in those of history.

The last chapters describe the development, in the 1980s, of a new
quest for the historical Jesus. This view rejects the idea that Jesus
expected the imminent end of the world, as Schweitzer had concluded.
Instead, it presents Jesus as looking for a new temple in Jewish
tradition, or a social critic in the Cynic tradition of Hellenism, or a
peasant reformer advocating a radical egalitarianism. In response to the
difficulty many scholars of the new quest for Jesus have with the
divinity of Jesus and/or the idea of literal resurrection, the Jesus
Seminar voted that the empty-tomb story is a legend. The authors
conclude by describing the challenge such views pose to various less
theologically trained church members as well as more traditional
scholars.

In addition to a bibliography, the book includes an excellent set of
footnotes and a chronology of relevant events, from the reign of
Augustus Caesar to 1994.