Introduction

In Jesus in an Age of Terror, I focused on developments in historical Jesus and Christian origins scholarship since the 1967 Six Day War and the intensification of Anglo-American Orientalism since the 1970s. I looked at how broad and hugely influential cultural trends relating to issues surrounding Israel and (neo-) Orientalism have had a profound impact on the rise of the emphasis on ‘Jesus the Jew’ and the construction of ‘the (contemporary) Arab world’, the latter at times becoming synonymous with ‘the Mediterranean’ in influential social-scientific approaches to the New Testament. In a different but complementary way, William Arnal argued that the rise of debates over Jesus’ ‘Jewishness’, and the scholarly construction of a fixed Jewish identity, ought to be seen as a reaction against the economic uncertainties and fractured identities associated with globalization and postmodernity. Whether we can more precisely connect postmodernity with the political trends in Anglo-American culture may well be impossible to establish with an absolute degree of certainty (though, as I will hopefully show, I do think the general case is a strong one), but I certainly think it can be argued that the historically contemporaneous rise of postmodernity and its economic counterpart have also had, as might obviously be expected, a profound impact on the ways in which the historical Jesus has been constructed in scholarship.