Investigate the man behind the faith

If you have picked up this school, I suspect you already know the frustration I am describing. You want to think seriously about Jesus of Nazareth — not to be talked at by a preacher, not to be handed a dismissive debunking, but to actually examine the evidence and reason through it carefully. You may be a believer with honest questions your tradition hasn't equipped you to answer. You may be a skeptic who wants to understand what serious scholarship actually says, rather than what partisans on either side claim it says. You may simply be a curious person who has encountered this question and found that most available resources pull you toward a predetermined conclusion before you have had a chance to think.

That is exactly what this school is designed to correct.

The historical study of Jesus is a mature, rigorous academic discipline with a literature spanning more than two centuries and contributions from scholars across the full range of religious conviction — from confessional Christians to committed atheists, from Jewish historians to secular classicists. What unites serious work in this field is not a shared theology or a shared skepticism, but a shared commitment to method: examining sources critically, situating figures in their historical context, applying consistent evidentiary standards, and being honest about what the evidence can and cannot establish.

That is the approach you will learn here. We begin with method itself — how historians work, what presuppositions do to our conclusions, and what "historical" actually means as a category of knowledge. Then we reconstruct the world of first-century Judea and Galilee, because Jesus cannot be understood apart from the Roman occupation, the rich diversity of Second Temple Judaism, the apocalyptic expectations that saturated Jewish life, and the social conditions of a Galilean peasant's existence. From there, we move systematically through the sources — the Synoptic Gospels, the Gospel of John, Paul's letters, non-canonical texts, Josephus, Tacitus — assessing each for its date, authorship, independence, and evidentiary value. We apply the standard historiographical criteria: multiple attestation, the criterion of embarrassment, dissimilarity, coherence. And we are honest about where those criteria have been criticized and why.

By the end, I want you to be able to do something specific: read a claim about the historical Jesus — in a book, a documentary, an online argument — and evaluate it on its merits. Not because you have memorized the right answers, but because you understand the method well enough to assess the reasoning yourself. That is what genuine historical literacy looks like, and it is a capacity that serves you whether your conclusions are orthodox, heterodox, or genuinely uncertain.

Come prepared to think carefully. Everything else, we will work through together.