ABSTRACT
In the case of historical Jesus research, the ultimate motivations of the work and its methods may be so ill-founded and self-contradictory as to render the entire enterprise illegitimate from an academic perspective. The historical Jesus is understood to be the figure who can be reconstructed with historical, rather than theological, methods, and who is important for history itself in some fashion. He is not regarded as a case study for the lives of ordinary people in Roman Palestine, and he cannot be described as a celebrity or publicly prominent figure in his own lifetime. The historical Jesus scholars assume that the relevance of Jesus as a historical person is as someone who accomplished something and thus changed the course of history. Since Jesus was no political or military figure, and never won a battle or occupied high office, the obvious accomplishment of his life was the initiation of a movement of religious reform that eventually became Christianity.
