Was Jesus a mainstream or sectarian Jew, as the scholarly consensus tells us? This view—that we must automatically adopt Second Temple Judaism as the paradigm in which to interpret or reconstruct the historical Jesus—is often presented as self-evident, unquestionable, and beyond dispute. However, the promotion of the Jewish Jesus raises serious questions—specifically, whether this consensus is the product of theological and ecumenical agendas. In Judaizing Jesus, noted scholar Robert M. Price challenges this trend and offers a menu of alternative ways of seeing Jesus: Sacred King, Cynic Philosopher, Gnostic Redeemer, and...the Buddha! He concludes by proposing a new theory of Christian origins to explain how and why the first Christians themselves Judaized Jesus.
