This book completes a journey that began in 1967 when I was just shy of eighteen years old and traveling in the former Yugoslavia. One oppressively hot day, wandering around the seaside town of Dubrovnik, I ducked into the dark confines of a medieval church. It was cool inside and very still. I'm not sure why, but I knew I was completely alone. I smelled the faint residue of incense, the musty aroma of damp stone. My steps echoed as I walked down the aisle between worn wooden pews, drawn to a frieze behind the altar depicting Christ on the cross. It was a typically medieval portrait; none of the gory details had been spared. The figure's head in bluish stone was askew, lolling. Spikes were driven through palms and blood ran down the wrists and arms. The feet had been turned sideways and nailed through the ankles. The bent knees were contorted and looked particularly vulnerable, helpless. The figure was slumped, the body twisted and broken. I had a momentary but searing impression of agony; I was moved by the figure's fragility in the face of a vast and violent universe, and I felt the crushing pain of our common mortality. But paradoxically, deep inside myself, I also felt the answering reverberations of something beyond pain, beyond despair. I turned and walked slowly out of the church and into the sunlight on cobbled streets. I was a kid, and the illumination was fleeting. I had better things to do than dwell on suffering and death. I bought a bottle of beer from a vendor near the harbor and sat drinking it, looking out over the blue Adriatic. Then I took a swim. My spiritual quest to that point had involved half-hearted attempts at Buddhist meditation. But the frieze and what it invoked germinated inside me. I couldn't shake it, and the Dubrovnik experience eventually led me to seek ordination.

Later I entered seminary and began to learn the techniques of biblical criticism. I was especially excited by how the study of ancient languages could yield insights into the original meanings of the texts, and I was drawn to academic research when I found that few scholars had examined the ancient literature of Judaism in Aramaic, the common language of the Jewish people in the first century that Jesus spoke. The Targums, paraphrases of the Hebrew Bible rendered in Aramaic, especially fascinated me. The Targums were part of the "Torah on the lips," the oral version of Scripture that Jesus worked from, and they were different in important ways from the Hebrew texts. I sensed they were key to understanding what Jesus believed and taught. I knew that the priesthood would be a futile pursuit for me unless it was based upon the best possible knowledge about Jesus and the origins of the Christian faith. How could the Church fail to pursue the cultural and social background of Jesus? How could we as priests fail to ask what Jesus' life had been like and how he had come to develop his extraordinary vision of God?

So alongside the priesthood I pursued a career as a scholar and teacher, learning Greek, Hebrew, and Latin (the stock in trade of New Testament scholarship), Aramaic to study the Targums, Coptic to study Gnostic texts, and Syriac -- a language closely related to Aramaic -- to explore early Christian sources like the Old Syriac Gospels. Instructed by these ancient literatures and no longer limited to what the Greek Gospels said, I began to understand Jesus on his own terms rather than in the categories of conventional scholarship and theology. I was stunned to discover that not only the inspiration behind Jesus' teachings, but also its actual content -- point by point -- was drawn directly from Jewish sources. A portrait of Jesus as an inspired rabbi with an exclusively Jewish agenda began to emerge. I started to see a completely new meaning in baptism, anointing the sick, the Lord's Prayer, the Eucharist, and resurrection. It became clear to me that everything Jesus did was as a Jew, for Jews, and about Jews.

I became part of the reevaluation of Jesus and Judaism. The basic fact that Jesus was Jewish is now fairly well established within scholarship and popular writing. The previous work of W. D. Davies, Asher Finkel, and Samuel Sandmel is a highly regarded part of the critical canon. By placing Jesus in his Jewish context they helped to overturn the once fashionable notion that the New Testament illuminated the contours of early Christian faith in Jesus, but taught us nothing important about the man himself.

Thanks to these and other penetrating studies, and a wealth of literary and archeological evidence that has accumulated since World War II, Jesus has emerged today as a truly historical figure. New evidence ranges from the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and fourth-century Gnostic gospels to the excavations of the Temple of Jerusalem, the tomb of the high priest Caiaphas, the city of Sepphoris, and a number of Galilean settlements, including Nazareth and Capernaum. These discoveries have added startling detail and depth to our understanding of religious culture at the dawn of the Common Era and shed bold new light on the life and character of Jesus.

A portrait of Jesus has emerged both in scholarship and popular literature from the discussion these finds have ignited. He becomes a witty philosopher, a Mediterranean peasant-savant descended from Greco-Roman heritage whose Judaism is an incidental fact of his ethnic background. This Jesus is fashionably separated from the traditional forms of religions against which intellectuals are perennially on their guard. The portrayal that has frequently emerged from "The Jesus Seminar" is a case in point: it has explored intriguing possibilities and sparked much useful controversy and debate, yet it fails to grapple with the complex issue of Jesus' own religious orientation as a Jew. In that regard, the "historical" Jesus who has emerged in recent years is as flawed as the venerated images of Christ from Renaissance art or glowing hagiographies by sectarian theologians.

For the past decade, I have felt that my colleagues in scholarship were isolating and analyzing the pieces of Jesus' life, but that no one was putting them together into a coherent whole. That is what I attempt to do in this book.

Rabbi Jesus offers the first comprehensive, critical biography of Jesus to date. I have been wrestling with fundamental questions about Jesus still largely unanswered, even while a growing consensus of scholarship has demolished the secularist myth that Jesus was a figment of faith. Why do the Gospels persistently refer to him as a rabbi? What did it mean to be a rabbi in the Judaism of the first century C.E.? Was Jesus typical of the rabbis of his time, or a maverick? Where did he get his ideas? How did he develop his teachings? How much can we unravel of his motives, the decisions he made, the choices he faced?

Recent excavations in Nazareth, Bethlehem, and Gush Halav give us a clear picture of the Galilean environment in which Jesus was born and raised. Jewish peasants vigilantly shielded themselves from the incursions of Hellenistic culture; they were a beleaguered people under the thumb of Rome who cherished their rich Judaic customs and traditions. For the most part, like Jesus, they were illiterate, and oral traditions such as the Targums represent were the foundation of their faith. These folk traditions illuminate Jesus' Judaic orientation and the vocabulary in which his teachings were framed. When we come to grips with the kind of Jew Jesus was, the arc of his life comes into focus for the first time.

The Jesus of scholarship has been doggedly two-dimensional; attention in book after book has been limited to the last three years of his public ministry, after his religious ideas had fully matured. This is because the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), the primary sources of New Testament scholarship, compressed the events of Jesus' life into a short period of time in order to make the story easy for new converts to assimilate. Even the best scholarship has hopelessly confused the abbreviated structure of the Gospels with the actual chronology of Jesus' life. Moreover, the Gospels pin the death of Jesus in their dramatic presentation for Greco-Romans on "the Jews," not the Roman government. That is historically inaccurate, but the popular acceptance of that error has fueled the fallacious belief that Jesus rejected Judaism and wanted to found a new religion. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Jesus' biography continues to be shrouded in mystery because the huge body of New Testament scholarship has been largely deaf to Judaism, while Jewish scholars regard Jesus as a forbidden topic, and with few exceptions refuse to examine him. As a non-Jew -- and a priest, at that -- I will doubtless make both Jews and Christians apprehensive with Rabbi Jesus. So inculcated are the taboos of our culture, so visceral the abyss between Judaism and Christianity, that I sometimes feel as if I am cross-dressing: transgressing basic categories that define who we are and how we differentiate ourselves in the world. But my hope is that Rabbi Jesus can point the way across the gulf of artificial ideologies and misguided animus that has long divided Jews and Christians (and different sects within Christianity) from one another.

Inference and logical reconstruction are, of course, necessary in order to explain Jesus' development and imagine how his life unfolded. Surmise is a stern taskmaster. I do not take any source that refers to Jesus, in the New Testament or elsewhere, at face value. I persist in asking: how did Jesus act, what did he say, to produce the results he did within the Judaism of his time? I do not read from the texts, I read behind them, and that means (for reasons that are explained as we move through Jesus' life) that the order of the Gospels as well as what they say often has to be contradicted, sometimes radically. Each position I take is a conscious choice among scholarly options, each the result of years of discussion with my students, and the rich debate I have enjoyed with hundreds of scholars, theologians, and lay people in different parts of the world interested in the fields of New Testament and ancient Judaism.

This book synthesizes my work as researcher and priest, a scholar who has pursued objective evidence with an eye on faith. I hope that by reconstructing Rabbi Jesus' life, I can help change our culture's perception of itself, because Jesus is a point of reference as we define who we are: Jew or Christian, believer or skeptic, scholar or seeker. My own study has been vastly enriched by the work of my predecessors and my contemporaries in scholarship; for each chapter, readers interested in digging deeper will find notes to guide them at the close of the book. Yet however much I have disagreed with the arguments of critics and the conventions of belief, my purpose in Rabbi Jesus is not to offend anyone, but to search through the complexities of evidence and arguments in order to find the core from which Christian faith was generated. The scenes that unfold in this book are set in the environment of Galilee and Judea and in the world of Judaism. Archaeology and scholarship have illuminated those contexts in ways that were scarcely conceivable a generation ago. Some readers have had problems with my speaking of specific deeds, words, thoughts, and emotions in those settings. Of course, no source gives us a literal record: what Jesus did and said at any particular time will always be a matter of inference. But scholarship is clear on issues such as how he dressed, what he would have eaten, heard, seen, and smelled as he traveled through Galilee and Judea. That impulse has guided my life both as a scholar and a believer who has been shaped by the vision of God that Jesus conveyed.