ABSTRACT
The historical study of Jesus produces results very different from what Christians are accustomed to hearing and affirming about Jesus. In this chapter, the author reflects on the relationship between Jesus scholarship and the Christian life. No distinction had yet been made between Jesus as a historical figure and the Jesus who meets us on the surface of the gospels, between the pre-Easter Jesus and the post-Easter Jesus. The Jesus of history and the canonical Christ were seen as identical, and this identification was not even an article of faith. In a work published in the late 1960s, Norman Perrin assigned considerable theological importance to the historical study of Jesus. Perrin affirms that historical knowledge about Jesus can be used as a basis for discriminating among the great variety of proclamations that claim to be Christian.
