Includes bibliographical references (p. 604-714) and indexes.

I. Disparate views about Jesus: The development of Jesus scholarship ; Jesus the cynic sage? ; Jesus and Judaism ; Other gospels? -- II. The character of the Gospels: ; The gospels as biographies ; Luke-Acts as history ; Ancient historiography as history ; Ancient historiography as rhetoric ; The gospels' written sources ; The gospels' oral sources -- III. What we learn about Jesus from the best sources: John the Baptist ; Jesus the Galilean Jew ; Jesus the teacher ; Kingdom discipleship ; Jesus' Jewish ethics ; Conflicts with other teachers ; Jesus the prophet ; Jesus as Messiah? ; More than an earthly Messiah ; Confronting and provoking the elite ; Jesus' arrest and execution ; The resurrection -- Appendix 1. Zealots and revolutionaries -- Appendix 2. Mack's case for a Wisdom Q -- Appendix 3. Jewish biographical conventions -- Appendix 4. Jesus' sayings about the end -- Appendix 5. John and the Synoptics on Passover chronology -- Appendix 6. Roman participation in Jesus' arrest? -- Appendix 7. Capital authority -- Appendix 8. What really happened at the tomb? -- Appendix 9. Some postresurrection teachings

The earliest substantive sources available for historical Jesus research are in the Gospels themselves; when interpreted in their early Jewish setting, their picture of Jesus is more coherent and plausible than are the competing theories offered by many modern scholars. So argues Craig Keener in The Historical Jesus of the Gospels. In exploring the depth and riches of the material found in the Synoptic Gospels, Keener shows how many works on the historical Jesus emphasize just one aspect of the Jesus tradition against others, but a much wider range of material in the Jesus tradition makes sense in an ancient Jewish setting. Keener masterfully uses a broad range of evidence from the early Jesus traditions and early Judaism to reconstruct a fuller portrait of the Jesus who lived in history. - Publisher.