We are therefore in a curious position when we try to place Jesus in his proper historical context. We know a very great deal about the short, final period of his life and hardly anything about the earlier period. Jesus himself wrote nothing, so far as we know. The sources we have for his public career—the four gospels in the New Testament—are dense, complex, and multilayered. They are works of art (of a sort) in their own right. But it is quite impossible to explain their very existence, let alone their detailed content, unless Jesus was himself not only a figure of real, solid history, but
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