‘A small book or treatise, such as may conveniently be held in the hand’: so the OED's first entry for ‘handbook’. The second entry, ‘b. A compendious book or treatise for guidance in any art, occupation’, is much more apposite in this instance – a collection of Wagnerian proportions in which the indices alone run to nearly two hundred pages. This four-volume set covers almost every topic in the field of research on the historical Jesus, all except one (curiously) in English, though with an impressively international cast of contributors (not excluding scholars from the Far East and Africa). In addition to the editors’ introductions to each volume, there are 101 contributions in all. The first volume is focused on method: the objects of study, the ‘quest’, criteria, the various ‘criticisms’ (form- , redaction- , etc.). The second is a rather amorphous collection, as illustrated by the title of its second part, ‘Current questions of Jesus research’ (the same could be said of volume iii/2, entitled ‘Fundamentally about Jesus’), but is dominated by the quest again, as well as the Synoptic problem, and studies of Jewish literature. The third covers ‘Jesus tradition in individual documents’ (canonical and non-canonical, including patristic, Jewish and classical literature), along with basic questions of historicity, chronology, birth, death and resurrection, and key themes in Jesus’ teaching. The fourth part consists of ‘Individual studies’, the selection of which is not quite clear, as in addition to staples such as ‘Jesus and the synagogue’ and ‘Jewish Galilee’ there are also exegetical treatments of specific passages.

Readers of this Journal will probably be more interested in what this collection says about the changing face of New Testament study than about the particular conclusions. First, most essays – as is widespread in New Testament scholarship currently – cast doubt on the neat typology of quests once proposed by Tatum (‘pre-quest’ up to 1778; ‘old quest’, 1778–1906; ‘no quest’, 1906–53; ‘new quest’, 1953–85; ‘post-quest’, 1985–). Baasland's essay, ‘Fourth quest’, cautiously endorses it however, while looking ahead to future possibilities. Even more strikingly, Charlesworth persists in presenting the history after the pattern of sequential Egyptian dynasties: ‘The five phases of the study of Jesus of Nazareth are as follows’, this time with the quest having begun in 1738 with Thomas Chubb's The true Gospel of Jesus Christ asserted (London: T. Cox), in contrast to the Schweitzer-influenced birth date of 1778 when the ‘Wolfenbüttel fragments’ of H. S. Reimarus were published by Lessing.

Secondly, one might highlight the profound disagreement (highlighted in Jürgen Becker's essay) over the usefulness of the traditional ‘criteria of authenticity’. Currently, no one is quite so confident about these as was the case in their hey-day half a century ago, but J. P. Meier probably represents the optimistic end of the spectrum in these volumes: he regards them as enabling scholars to move from the possible to the probable, though rarely more. On the other hand, D. C. Allison contends that where there is reliable memory of the historical Jesus in the Gospels, this lies in themes and motifs; we are, in contrast, unable to authenticate particular sayings; Porter's essay is similar sceptical, focusing on the problems with the individual criteria. Others, such as Gerd Theissen, question many of the standard criteria, while proposing alternatives, in his case a complex ‘criterion of plausibility’.

A marked difference between this collection and – say, Schweitzer's 1906 account of his ‘old quest’ – is the attention to extra-canonical Jesus tradition. When Schweitzer referred to ‘the Gospels’, it was clear what was meant. Aside from references to Marcion's Luke, Seydel's hypothetical Buddhist-style Gospel, and hypothetical sources which are standard fare in the discussion of the Synoptic problem, there is no mention by Schweitzer of the Infancy Gospels, the ‘Jewish-Christian’ gospels or the Gospel of the Egyptians known from patristic testimony, or the (then) recently discovered fragments of the Gospel of Thomas and Gospel of Peter. Resch is mentioned for his view of the original language of Jesus’ teaching, but not as the author of Agrapha (1889). This is clearly very different from the situation today, when even a conservative author such as J. P. Meier has devoted a fifty-page introductory essay to the question of the agrapha and the apocryphal gospels in the prolegomena to his multi-volume A marginal Jew. In the present collection, Hedrick has a chapter addressing non-canonical matters in general, and the (authentic, in his view) ‘parable of the assassin’ in Gospel of Thomas 98. Broadhead's chapter addresses the Gospel of Thomas, and Nicklas covers Jesus tradition in the other apocrypha, as does Labahn. The influence of Thomas is also felt in various places elsewhere (the entries in the index locorum run to two pages), such as in J. D. Crossan and J. M. Robinson's treatments of the kingdom of God.

One could add other elements. In terms of the Synoptic problem, considerable space is given over to alternatives to the two-document hypothesis (Dungan contesting Markan priority; Goulder contesting Q). Another wider development in scholarship which is to a degree reflected in these volumes is the relative conservatism in present New Testament study in general, and on the historical Jesus in particular, at least by comparison with the situation a generation or two ago. So, for example, two essays (by France, and at greater length Puig i Tarrèch) argue that Jesus was born not in Nazareth but in Bethlehem. Again, while we have seen that for Allison the problems with the criteria lead to scepticism about individual segments of the Jesus tradition, for Porter the principal difficulty with them arises when they are used negatively to exclude material as inauthentic. Hoehner's essay on chronology is confident both about the possibility of our having knowledge of precise dates, and that the Gospels are the places from which to acquire that knowledge. Having said all that, there is no special party line represented in the essays across the board. Finally, this collection, with its 850-page first volume (and other essays beyond) on how to approach the subject, reflects the mood of much historical Jesus research in its excessive concern with method.

Perhaps the primary use of these volumes will be for teachers of the New Testament. Indeed, many lecturing on Jesus may not feel the need to have much else on the desk for preparing or updating lectures. Many of the individual chapters represent very helpful overviews of ‘Jesus and …’ topics: J. J. Collins on the background to the ‘Son of Man’ title; Steve Mason on the importance of Josephus; the chapters by Porter and Casey on the original language of Jesus’ teaching. Overall, this will be a useful set for New Testament teachers and students, if their libraries are able to afford it.