When we meet jesus of nazareth at the beginning of the gospel of mark, almost surely the oldest of the four, he’s a full grown man. He comes down from galilee, meets john, an ascetic desert hermit who lives on locusts and wild honey, and is baptized by him in the river jordan. If one thing seems nearly certain to the people who read and study the gospels for a living, it’s that this really happened: john the baptizer as some like to call him, to give a better sense of the original greek’s flat footed active form baptized jesus.

If jesus says something nice, then someone is probably saying it for him if he says something nasty, then probably he really did. What the amateur reader wants, given the thickets of uncertainty that surround the garden, is not what the passionate polemicists want not so much a verdict on whether jesus was nasty or nice as a sense of what, if anything, was new in his preaching. The current scholarly tone is, judging from the new books, realist but pessimistic. Holmes dies because heroes must, and returns from the dead, like jesus, because the audience demanded it. The view that the search for the historical jesus is like the search for the historical superman that there’s nothing there but a hopeful story and a girlfriend with an alliterative name has by now been marginalized from the seminaries to the internet the scholar earl doherty defends it on his web site with grace and tenacity. The american scholar bart ehrman has been explaining the scholars’ truths for more than a decade now, in a series of sincere, quiet, and successful books.

Ehrman is one of those best selling authors like richard dawkins and robert ludlum and peter mayle, who write the same book over and over but the basic template is so good that the new version is always worth reading. The odd absences in mark are matched by the unreal presences in the other gospels. The beautiful nativity story in luke, for instance, in which a roman census forces the holy family to go back to its ancestral city of bethlehem, is an obvious invention, since there was no empire wide census at that moment, and no sane roman bureaucrat would have dreamed of ordering people back to be counted in cities that their families had left hundreds of years before. The author of luke, whoever he might have been, invented bethlehem in order to put jesus in david’s city. James tabor, a professor of religious studies, in his 2006 book the jesus dynasty, takes surprisingly seriously the old jewish idea that jesus was known as the illegitimate son of a roman soldier named pantera as well attested a tradition as any, occurring in jewish texts of the second century, in which a jesus ben pantera makes several appearances, and the name is merely descriptive, not derogatory. Tabor has even found, however improbably, a tombstone in germany for a roman soldier from syria palestine named pantera.

What seems a simple historical truth is that all the gospels were written after the destruction of jerusalem and the temple in the first jewish roman war, in 70 c.e. A catastrophe so large that it left the entire jesus movement in a crisis that we can dimly imagine if we think of jewish attitudes before and after the holocaust: the scale of the tragedy leads us to see catastrophe as having been built into the circumstance. Michael white’s scripting jesus: the gospels in rewrite harperone $28.99 explains in daunting scholarly detail, even mark which, coming first, might seem to be closest to the truth was probably written in the ruins of the temple and spiritually shaped to its desolate moment. Mark’s essential point, he explains, is about secrecy: jesus keeps telling people to be quiet about his miracles, and confides only to an inner circle of disciples.

With the temple gone, white says, it was necessary to persuade people that the grotesque political failure of jesus’ messianism wasn’t a real failure. Mark invents the idea that jesus’ secret was not that he was the davidic messiah, the arthur like returning king, but that he was someone even bigger: the son of god, whose return would signify the end of time and the birth of the kingdom of god. The literary critic frank kermode, in the genesis of secrecy 1979 , a pioneering attempt to read mark seriously as poetic literature, made a similar point, though his is less historical than interpretative. Kermode considers mark to be, as the french would say, a text that reads itself: the secret it contains is that its central figure is keeping a secret that we can never really get.

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It is an intentionally open ended story, prematurely closed, a mystery without a single solution. Even if we make allowances for mark’s cryptic tracery, the human traits of his jesus are evident: intelligence, short temper, and an ironic, duelling wit. What seems new about jesus is not his piety or divine detachment but the humanity of his irritability and impatience. He gets annoyed at the stupidity of his followers, their inability to grasp an obvious point.

The fine english actor alec mccowen used to do a one man show in which he recited mark, complete, and his jesus came alive instantly as a familiar human type the gandhi malcolm martin kind of charismatic leader of an oppressed people, with a character that clicks into focus as you begin to dramatize it. He likes defiant, enigmatic paradoxes and pregnant parables that never quite close, perhaps by design. A story about a vineyard whose ungrateful husbandmen keep killing the servants sent to them is an anti establishment, even an anti clerical story, but it isn’t so obvious as to get him in trouble. The suspicious priests keep trying to catch him out in a declaration of anti roman sentiment: is it lawful to give tribute to caesar or not, they ask that is, do you recognize roman authority or don’t you? he has a penny brought out, sees the picture of the emperor on it, and, shrugging, says to give to the state everything that rightly belongs to the state.

The brilliance of that famous crack is that jesus turns the question back on the questioner, in mock innocence. Of course, this leaves open the real question: what is caesar’s and what is god’s? it’s a tautology designed to evade self incrimination. Jesus’ morality has a brash, sidewise indifference to conventional ideas of goodness. When he makes that complaint about the prophet having no honor in his own home town, or says exasperatedly that there is no point in lighting a candle unless you intend to put it in a candlestick, his voice carries a disdain for the props of piety that still feels startling. And so with the tale of the boy who wastes his inheritance but gets a feast from his father, while his dutiful brother doesn’t or the one about the weeping whore who is worthier than her good, prim onlookers or about the passionate mary who is better than her hardworking sister martha.

There is a wild gaiety about jesus’ moral teachings that still leaps off the page. Macculloch points out that he continually addresses god as abba, father, or even dad, and that the expression translated in the king james version as a solemn verily i say unto you is actually a quirky aramaic throat clearer, like dr. Some of the sayings do have, in their contempt for material prosperity, the ring of greek cynic philosophy, but there is also something neither quite greek nor quite jewish about jesus’ morality that makes it fresh and strange even now. This social radicalism still shines through not a programmatic radicalism of national revolution but one of kerouac like satori seeking on the road. The sharpest opposition in the gospels, the scholar and former priest john dominic crossan points out in his illuminating books the historical jesus: the life of a mediterranean jewish peasant is the best known is between john the faster and jesus the feaster. Jesus eats and drinks with whores and highwaymen, turns water into wine, and, finally, in one way or another, establishes a mystical union at a feast through its humble instruments of bread and wine.

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Crossan, the co founder of the jesus seminar, makes a persuasive case that jesus’ fressing was perhaps the most radical element in his life that his table manners pointed the way to his heavenly morals. Crossan sees jesus living within a mediterranean jewish peasant culture, a culture of clan and cohort, in which who eats with whom defines who stands where and why. So the way jesus repeatedly violates the rules on eating, on commensality, would have shocked his contemporaries. He dines with people of a different social rank, which would have shocked most romans, and with people of different tribal allegiance, which would have shocked most jews. The most forceful of his sayings, still shocking to any pious jew or muslim, is what goes into a man’s mouth does not make him unclean, but what comes out of his mouth, that is what makes him unclean. Jesus isn’t a hedonist or an epicurean, but he clearly isn’t an ascetic, either: he feeds the multitudes rather than instructing them how to go without. He’s interested in saving people living normal lives, buying and selling what they can, rather than in retreating into the company of those who have already arrived at a moral conclusion about themselves.