Jesus of Nazareth was a first-century teacher, miracle worker, and messianic figure. His chief aim was to promote religious renewal among the Jewish people in anticipation of the kingdom of God, which he believed to be dawning in his ministry. His personal authority and vision of fundamental change won many sympathizers but also created fierce opposition.

The resurrection of Jesus, pivotal to Christian history and praxis, is universally attested in early Christian sources, even if often critiqued or sidelined as myth or apologetics in modern scholarship. Paul’s letters and of the Gospels in their narrative diversity document the resurrection’s transformative and abiding impact on Jesus’s followers. In bringing the aspirations of myth and metaphor to fruition in time, the resurrection of Jesus is both an event in history and yet constitutes a new reality that transcends the register of available language and analogy.

Despite its familiarity, the fourfold canonical gospel presents a challenge for interpreters, captured in the famous symbols of the evangelists. Mark’s Jesus embodies the paradox of the crucified king of Israel. Matthew adds to this a portrait of Jesus the Prophet-like-Moses and Davidic shepherd who renews Israel’s covenant. Luke presents Jesus as Lord and prophet who brings redemption and distinctively champions the poor. John’s Jesus is the Word from the beginning and glorified Son of the Father. These subsequently canonized gospels stand out as authoritative amidst proliferating Jesus books. An approach that respects the fourfold gospel’s catholicity as well as its holding together of tensions in the historical impact of Jesus of Nazareth on his followers may be a fruitful path toward perceiving the one Jesus in the canonical Four.

In exploring ancient apocryphal traditions, we uncover a tapestry of Jesus’s portrayals both converging and contrasting with canonical gospels. These “Jesus books” – infancy, ministry, passion, and dialogue gospels – showcase early Christianity’s narrative dynamism. Apocryphal texts reveal Jesus as a wise or petulant child, challenging Jewish norms or Torah-observant, literate, philosophical, mythological, hell-conquering, and anti-apostolic. These diverse depictions, addressing sociocultural and theological questions of the era, provide alternative or supplementary perspectives on Jesus’s identity and teachings, significantly contributing to our understanding of early Christian diversity and doctrinal development.

For much of history, from the dawn of Greek historiography to the postmodern 1970s, genealogy has been synonymous with continuity of origins and blood identity, and therefore closely connected with the concepts of the classic and the canon. Yet, during the last half century, specially thanks to the Nietzschean and Foucauldian philosophical deployment, it has shed its narrative garb to become an agent of discontinuity, and thus the nemesis of the classic and the canon. Many scholars have analyzed the modern development of genealogies after Nietzsche’s alleged foundational statement and its Foucauldian reception. But none of them has provided a systematic history of the trajectory of this concept, from antiquity to the present. This chapter attempts to fill this gap by providing a history of the concept of genealogy and its associated ideas, delving specifically into its historiographical uses, and connecting it to the four previous concepts discussed in the book. I will, specifically, emphasize its polysemy, try to locate what has remained and what has changed in this long trajectory, and explain the (only recently) radically opposed nature (nemesis) between the concepts of genealogy and canon – and the implications that this opposition brings to historiography.

Seminal iconographic innovations in early Christian images of the divinely inspired evangelists reflect fundamentally changed attitudes toward the authenticity and authority of sacred texts. These portraits depart significantly from relevant pagan and Jewish imagery in that they emphasize the accurate documentation of the revealed texts in writing. The early Byzantine iconography of divine inspiration substantiates visually claims of Christianity being the only “true religion” that were expressed by late antique theologians and are also manifest in imperial legislation.

After Iconoclasm, portraits of the inspired evangelists continue to clearly dominate in number among depictions of biblical authors receiving divine revelations. This chapter’s textual and visual analysis reveals a hierarchy among biblical authors that applies even to those of the canonical Gospels: John is the only evangelist whose divine inspiration is particularly highlighted in the hagiographical literature, and his privileged role is also strongly reflected in art.

The New Testament, like the Old, offers exemplary models for the conjugation of poetry and prose working together in order to make poetically possible a revelation of the divine. The beatitudes, liturgical hymns like the Magnificat, and prayers like the Pater noster communicate lyrically a sense of salvation to those who experience the Christ and believe. Such lyric core texts provide a basis for expansion into the full-blown historical narrative of the Bible. The synergy of poetry and prose is crucial in the process of memorialization of a life-transforming love followed by the death of the beloved and the glorification of the beloved person in an afterlife. The experience of Christ by his disciples, as crystalized in the New Testament, proves in these respects to prefigure Dante’s experience of Beatrice, as recorded and interpretively actualized in the Vita nuova. Dante’s book opens penetrating insight into the indispensable role of literary construction in the theological revelation of its progenitor text, Holy Scripture, especially the Gospels.

Provides an analysis of historical Jesus studies and the key interpretative issues scholars seek to address. Surveying scholarship from the eighteenth century on, Fowl disentangles the guiding assumptions of historical Jesus research in its quest for a dispassionate assessment of historical ‘facts’ and interpretative frameworks. As case studies, Fowl compares the major accounts of Jesus offered by John Dominic Crossan, N. T. Wright and Luke Timothy Johnson.

McCarthy builds on a trend in the theology of scripture according to which the truth of the text is discovered in the ‘performance’ of the text in the lives of individuals and communities. On this basis, he offers a series of cameos in which the ‘exegesis’ of a gospel text takes biographical form, and the lives of saints and martyrs become a kind of extension of the scriptural canon.

Frances Young explores the changing relationship in the history of the early church between the gospel texts and the determination of true doctrine. She shows that, even when the four gospels had been accepted as canonical, what shaped doctrine most was the overarching sense of what scripture as a whole was about, epitomized in the ’Rule of Faith’ and the creeds.