When History and Faith Collide: Studying Jesus

Hedrick explores the tension, or collision, that occurs when one studies the Jesus of faith with the critical eye of historical scholarship. He outlines the nature of historical inquiry, gives a brief history of how scholars have understood Jesus, and identifies the essential issues confronting the reader of the New Testament Gospel accounts of Jesus: discrepancies, contradictions, and differences as well as strong similarities among different writers. "For many Christians, studying the historical Jesus disrupts and challenges their comfortable faith in the divine Christ of the creeds they have repeated all their lives. According to Hedrick, such conflict can 'bring new insights, a broader understanding, and a deeper appreciation for the complementary relationship between faith and history.' . . . In clear and precise prose, Hedrick asserts that the best way to understand the historical Jesus is to study the Gospels as 1st-century texts that present us with information about the life and death of Jesus. His book serves as an introduction to the central conflicts inherent in the contemporary study of Jesus." —Publishers Weekly