Jesus of Nazareth may be one of the most well known and yet least understood figures of history. Each year brings new attempts to uncover new pieces of the Jesus puzzle or to reassemble familiar pieces to make a new picture. The historians and theologians, believers and sceptics, academics and lay people who author these texts bring their own, often conflicting, perspectives and interests to this work. Recent volumes by Andrade and by Bockmuehl are valuable additions to this effort that reflect two directions of interest in the field. Andrade’s monograph brings a historian’s perspective to the Jesus event, working to cut through the theological biases of his sources. In contrast, nearly all of the contributors to Bockmuehl’s volume consider the impact of the subject beyond the traditional scope of the so-called historical Jesus. Each work makes its own valuable contribution to the ever-growing corpus of Jesus books, and together they expose both the challenges and the opportunities of trying to capture this complicated figure in a single volume.

Andrade’s work begins from the premise that, as a historically reliable data point, the trial and crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth by Pontius Pilate should make sense. More specifically, he assumes that any explanation of this event should make sense, or be explicable, within the context of the relevant legal mechanisms of the first-century Roman provincial Middle East. This is the sort of idea that, once you read it, feels so obvious that it is hard to believe that it has not already been covered many times over. In its simplicity, however, Andrade’s premise exposes the many ways in which scholarship has historically gone out of its way to prevent this data point from just making sense. Beholden to the canonical Gospels’ accounts, Christian tradition or unquestioned assumptions, historical reconstructions have often bent over backwards to exonerate Jesus or Pilate or both. Andrade works to avoid that illogic, using his expertise concerning the intricacies of the political and judicial systems of the Roman Eastern provinces to complicate the questions beyond the well-worn path of who had the legal authority to execute.

Part 1, ‘Politics and People’, lays the groundwork for the rest of the book through an overview of the sociopolitical climate of Roman Judaea in the first century. Chapter 1, ‘Places, Peoples, and Empire’, considers the area’s complicated historical, geographical, religious, political and demographic landscapes to establish the milieu of conflict that, Andrade argues, characterised the region at the time of Jesus of Nazareth. Chapters 2 and 3 fill in details about the characters at play among both ‘The Governing Order’ and ‘Dissenters’, respectively. Each snapshot – of Herod Antipas, the Chief Priests and Scribes, the synhedrion, the Sadducees, the Pharisees and Pilate himself – comes off as almost sympathetic, depicting groups and individuals with sincere interests not only in their own power but also in public welfare. In the same way, those subjected to these powers are shown to have legitimate reasons to want to shake off their yokes. A real strength of this work is in showing the multiple and often competing interests both between and within the various relevant groups, resisting the temptation to create an easy villain – or hero – out of anyone.

Part 2, ‘Jesus of Nazareth and the Gospels’, is the least cohesive section, but it contains two important chapters that might have been difficult to place elsewhere. In Chapter 4, ‘The New Testament Gospels and Jesus’, Andrade considers the sources and acknowledges the complicating factors in using the four canonical Gospels to reconstruct history, particularly the history of Jesus’s trial. Despite acknowledging myriad challenges, Andrade lands on a generally positive assessment of the ability to recover reliable kernels of Jesus data from such unreliable sources. He exercises this ability in Chapter 5, ‘Jesus, Herod Antipas, and Galilee’, which examines the New Testament’s inconsistent depictions of Herod Antipas’s antipathy towards dissidents. As a Roman-appointed ethnarch, Antipas would have been aligned with Roman power and wealth and wary of any potential threats to the status quo. His hostility, then, Andrade determines, is historically reliable, while any apparent acceptance of Jesus of Nazareth is the result of Christian authors’ narrative interests. Because Antipas did arrest and execute John the Baptist, the ruler would also have had both the political motive and means to execute Jesus, had Jesus not successfully evaded arrest in Galilee. This is a compelling interpretation of the Gospels’ often-perplexing motif of secrecy concerning Jesus’s mission and highlights the author’s creative, and sometimes selective, use of the sources.

Parts 3 and 4, ‘Arresting Jesus’ and ‘Jesus’ Trial and Death’, respectively, offer the crux of Andrade’s argument concerning the mechanisms by which Jesus was arrested, tried and executed within the legal system of Roman Judaea. Rather than offering simply a timeline of events, the author builds on the foundation laid in previous chapters concerning the web of relationships among various imperial, provincial and municipal leaders and those under their authority to sketch how each contributed to the relevant events. The chapter ‘Jesus, the Temple, and the Chief Priests’ considers Jesus’s behaviour in the Temple precinct during the Passover festival, primarily through the eyes of the Chief Priests, a group of elite, Roman-aligned municipal leaders charged with keeping the masses of pilgrims safe in the Temple. Incendiary preaching to the masses concerning the destruction of the Temple and the revolutionary reign of God would have provided more than enough perception of a threat to precipitate Jesus’s arrest. The chapter on ‘Jesus’ Arrest’ establishes that this very group, the Chief Priests and allied scribes – as Roman boulē in Jerusalem –, would have been the ones with the authority and motivation to make such an arrest, to keep people safe and to keep themselves in good standing with Rome.

Part 4 opens with the Chapter ‘Jesus and “the Sanhedrin”’, which lends clarity to the status of the synhedrion and the scope of their authority. Here again, Andrade brings fresh insight from his expertise in Roman juridical practice in the provinces to elucidate the purpose of this hearing and consider the group’s stake in the matter. Whatever personal or theological complaints they may have had against Jesus, the only executable charge for them to convince Pilate of would have been sedition. This, Andrade argues in the chapter ‘Pilate and Sedition’, is exactly the case that Jesus’s accusers must have made, and made convincingly, to Pilate. In the absence of a single comprehensive definition for sedition, the question whether a particular action would qualify, and what the appropriate punishment would be if it did, was left largely in the hands of individual governors. In the chapter ‘Pilate’s Path, Jesus’ Trial’ Andrade unpacks the choices available to Pilate. Unpersuaded by the Gospels’ attempts to exculpate the prefect, the author argues that Pilate’s decision not only to execute but to publicly humiliate, torture and crucify Jesus affirms that he must have held that Jesus’s inflammatory preaching in a Temple crowded with pilgrims, at an already volatile moment, was a threat to public safety. And he must have found this to be a capital offence. Nevertheless, Jesus’s execution was the result of a confluence of factors, including the vicissitudes of Pilate and the Roman provincial legal system. Andrade expounds upon this point in Part 5, ‘Aftermaths and Apostles’, by showing how inconsistent the Roman courts were in dealing with Jesus’s early followers. Under a different governor, Jesus might never have been executed.

This work shines in the cogency of its central argument and its detailed illumination of the complex legal landscape of Roman-occupied Judaea. Its careful attention to the sincere, if often messy, motivations of those on all sides of power offers a significant contribution to the field. And its work to make sense of Jesus’s execution is compelling. That Andrade presents these arguments largely without relying on the traditional categories or terminology of historical Jesus scholarship may appeal to a primarily lay audience. A similar observation could be made concerning how the argument frames the central conflict as a matter of class and colonialism, but with even less direct engagement with the relevant scholarship in those critical areas. These observations are likely features of this being a work for a smart but non-expert public. What is more, anyone familiar with historical Jesus studies knows that a clear and rigorous methodology does not necessarily improve the situation. Still, the work at times appears as if it was an objective history, one that has somehow risen above the subjectivities of scholarship rather than acknowledging its own biases. Nevertheless, the work is impressive in the ways in which it brings Andrade’s expertise in Roman provincial legal systems to bear on this most-remarkable legal proceeding and leaves readers wondering at the almost unremarkable, or at least necessarily explicable, nature of its outcome.

Bockmuehl’s edited volume goes far beyond just an updated version of the 2001 Cambridge Companion to Jesus to make a substantial new contribution to the Cambridge Companion series and to the library of Jesus resource volumes. As the editor’s introduction highlights, the New Companion shares only two chapters in common with its predecessor, and even those have been substantially rewritten. Most notably, the New Companion sets out to situate Jesus within the diverse contexts of global Christianity in the twenty-first century rather than the world of Euro-American historical Jesus studies – an ambitious goal that perhaps proves difficult to achieve.

The chapters in Part 1, ‘Origins’, bring primarily historical interests to the texts of the New Testament and other early Christian theological writings to reconstruct various aspects of Jesus’s life or memory. Beginning with the canonical Gospels, in the ‘Life and Aims of Jesus’ D.C. Allison, Jr. uses the memories contained in these sources to reconstruct a historical Jesus whose ethics, community and work were all grounded in his sense of the imminent coming of a reign of God. L. Doering follows this with a consideration of ‘Jesus’s Religion, Praxis, and Experience of God’, which reads through and into the Gospel accounts – in conversation with other roughly contemporary Jewish sources – to highlight how Jesus’s sense of his community, his God and even his self were products of his Galilean Jewish context. In ‘Jesus in the Fourfold Gospel’ J.T. Brown and N. Eubank reckon with the complexities posed by the four canonical Gospels and propose a model of an ‘apostolic conference’ in which the individual voices of the evangelists might be read and appreciated as part of a shared fourfold conversation concerning a single gospel of Jesus. M.V. Novenson looks at the letters of Paul to consider ‘Paul’s Jesus as the Christ’. He observes that christos is the primary way in which Paul identifies Jesus, and he argues that doing so must have made sense within the Greek-speaking Judaism of the mid-first century. In ‘The Risen Jesus’ Bockmuehl tackles the historically and theologically complicated question of the resurrection and takes seriously the ‘outcome’ of a historical record that near-universally affirms that something happened. L. Ayres shifts attention onto later creedal debates in order to outline the development of Christian understanding concerning ‘Jesus and the Triune God’. The chapter gives an appreciation of the ongoing, multiple and often competing visions that informed the creeds, rather than merely the finished products or their later significance. Finally in this section, J. Grillo draws on Catholic teaching to propose that, in the light of the resurrection, previously latent meaning within the Hebrew Bible might now allow Christian readers to find ‘Jesus in the Scriptures of Israel’. Part 1’s consideration of ‘origins’ already shows the diversity – of approaches, perspectives and sources – that can be brought to bear on the question of Jesus.

Part 2, ‘The Diversity of Reception’, expands the scope of inquiry to include non-canonical, non-Christian and non-textual sources for considering Jesus’s impact. J.A. Rodriguez, for example, considers ‘The Apocryphal Jesus’, or Jesuses, represented in the abundant and diverse non-canonical gospels, each of which can best be seen as a repository of communal memory anchored in the person of Jesus while reflecting the contemporary concerns of its author and community. N. Sinai surveys the Qur’an and later Arabic and Persian sources to introduce ‘The Islamic Jesus’ and Mary to make sense of the Islamic sources as a critical reception of the Jesus story through the lens of rigorous monotheism. The last three chapters of this section move away from primarily textual sources, as each considers how other media worked to communicate to Christian audiences the continued presence of Jesus despite his absence. J. Coogan reviews evidence from amulets to codices to relics to the holy land itself in order to trace the sincere ecclesial authority and presence of ‘Jesus in Christian Material Culture’. R. Jensen and J. Begbie outline a handful of common types of ‘Jesus in Art and Music’, using early Christian catacomb paintings to twenty-first century choral works to show how artists have represented their own context and theological understanding of Jesus through their relevant media. Finally, in a chapter on ‘Jesus in the Story of Spirituality and Worship’ V. Leppin traces the history of how Christian tradition – specifically in the Latin Church – has developed practices of veneration around multiple stages of Jesus’s life to allow followers to connect to Jesus through their own praxis.

Part 3, ‘Ethics, Theology, and Christian Scholarship’, shifts the focus from the history of Jesus in texts and culture to various dimensions of contemporary Christian thought and practice. R. Eklund brings several theological perspectives to bear in looking at the role of ‘Jesus in Christian Discipleship and Ethics’ to offer a critical analysis of how Jesus’s life can serve as a model to invite Christian practitioners into communion with Jesus and with their neighbours without shying away from at least some of the ways in which these models can also do harm. In the chapter ‘The Body of Jesus in His People’ T.J. White, OP, reflects on the role of Jesus in ecclesiology and explains the ways in which the church represents the mystical body of Jesus and thus is an ongoing site of divine presence in history. E. Durand, OP, addresses issues of Christology in a chapter on ‘The Church’s Jesus in Modern Theology’, arguing that understanding the historical reality of Jesus of Nazareth ought not be an end in itself but a means through which to view the revealed nature of both God and humanity. Finally, J. Carleton Paget outlines ‘The History of Jesus in Biblical Scholarship’ by reviewing not only the multiple familiar ‘Quests’ for the historical Jesus of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but also the problematising of those quests and their methods that has happened in the last quarter century.

In Part 4 the volume shifts attention to ‘The Global Jesus Today’. Each chapter underscores in its own way the necessarily contextualised nature of Jesus studies, a fact that would be easy to miss in previous sections. B.U. Meyer looks at ‘The Jewish Jesus in Christian and in Jewish Memory’ to explore how Christian scholarship is only just beginning to – and hopefully will continue to – recognise the impact of a fully Jewish Jesus. In ‘The Racial Jesus’ J. Tran asks what drives the desire to racialise Jesus and sees identification as the key: the ability of racial humanity to identify with God via a racial Jesus. In the chapter ‘Jesus, Power, and the Global Poor’ C.R. Sosa Siliezar and A.V. John draw on Liberation Theology to see how the Jesus of the Gospels challenges structures of wealth and power and stands in solidarity with the oppressed. This analysis highlights how the global church works both for and against Jesus’s example. In ‘The Asian Faces of Jesus’ K.K. Yeo applies an Asian hermeneutic of Jesus to identify how Asian representations of Jesus in theology, culture and art reflect both biblical and indigenous origins. Finally, in ‘Jesus of Africa’ D.B. Stinton and V.I. Ezigbo argue that African Christianity’s unifying aspects must be read against the deeply contextual nature of its diverse expression. While the editor and the contributors should certainly be commended for including these essays, cordoning them off into a single section of the volume could perpetuate the idea that these Jesuses remain fundamentally other than the biblical, historical and theological Jesuses considered in the previous sections.

Finally, in the concluding section, Part 5, C.K. Rowe returns to Christian Scripture with a surprising philosophical-eschatological lens to consider ‘The Future of Jesus of Nazareth: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow’ and concludes with a theological affirmation of Jesus as the beginning and end of all.

There is much to commend in this volume. It covers a remarkable span of time, space and scholarship in one volume. It has intentionally eschewed much of the historical critical focus of the original Companion though a reader familiar with that prior volume may be surprised to find that most of the present entries lean heavily towards a theological interest in Jesus. Published less than 25 years after its predecessor, this New Companion is expressly meant to respond to shifts in culture and the landscape of global Christianity since the turn of the century. The editor names the ‘Hotly contested challenges of culture and race, gender and decolonization, along with Christianity’s global reorientation from a Western-dominated perspective to a global, primarily Southern and Eastern Jesus’ as movements that make this new volume needed and acknowledges the ways in which these ‘challenges’ have been felt even within New Testament and historical Jesus research (Bockmuehl, p. 2). While the editor is no doubt sincere in this intention, readers looking for that focus will likely be left wanting. Still, the approachable essays collected here offer a useful resource for those interested in these select facets of Jesus as a figure in history and contemporary theology.

While very different in approach, each of these volumes makes a valuable contribution to the ever-developing picture of Jesus.