One purpose of a book like this is to provide a context for future specific case studies on an aspect of Jesus and New Testament scholarship relating to neoliberalism and its cultural wings. We have certainly seen how issues surrounding neoliberalism have had a profound impact on historical Jesus studies over the past forty years. The whole industry has been swept along, like so much in contemporary culture, by neoliberal trends, from the intensification of marketing different Jesuses and Jesus the Great Man to a historical Jesus (or a historical Jesus who did not exist) being fought over in the so-called ‘culture wars’. All too often these Jesuses buy into dominant neoliberal trends and contribute to the masking of social realities. Even when some of the scholarship and thinking on Jesus and the Gospels thinks it is opposing dominant political and cultural trends, it can still manage to produce a context utterly complementary to the politics the scholar personally utterly opposes (see chapter 4). By way of analogy with the influence of dominant political trends on previous eras of New Testament studies, none of this ought to be a surprise, but as there remains a relative ignorance in mainstream historical Jesus studies of such historical analysis of its own intellectual history, then this point cannot be made too strongly.