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.
