The Da Vinci Code. Misquoting Jesus. The Jesus Papers. The Gospel of Judas.

New portraits of Jesus continue to stir up interest and debate. The more unusual the portrait, the more it departs from the traditional view of Jesus, and the more attention it receives in the popular media. Critical study of the Gospels has often shed light on the Jesus of history - but has also distorted the Gospels and rendered Jesus unrecognizable.

Why are some scholars so prone to fabricate a new Jesus? What methods and assumptions predispose them to distort the record? Why is the public so eager to accept such claims without question? Is there a more sober approach to finding the real Jesus?

Craig Evans offers insights into the methods and biases of modern interpreters, whether scholars associated with the Jesus Seminar or popularizers like Michael Baigent and Dan Brown. He examines how we got today's New Testament text, how ancient historians did their work, what second-century Gnosticism was all about, and the way first-century Jewish and Greek culture informs scholarly study of the Gospels. Readers will come away with a new appreciation of the value and limits of contemporary biblical research.