This book is effectively a non-comprehensive cultural history of contemporary scholarship mostly relating in some way to the historical Jesus. In a previous book, Jesus in an Age of Terror (Equinox, 2008), which this present book complements, I argued for the importance of contemporary Anglo-American foreign policies and geopolitics concerning the Middle East to be seen as a significant driving force behind major cultural trends and the ways in which academic ideas have been framed, not least those which involve historical research into the Middle East in some form, such as New Testament and Christian origins scholarship. In this present book, I want to look at the related economic and cultural trends in which such geopolitics are embedded and which in some way influence almost everything we do, whether in academic roles or outside work in leisure time or, indeed, whatever and wherever.

Put simply, a major aim of this book is to show how some presentations of the historical Jesus, from learned academics to amateur bloggers, have been, over the past forty years, embedded in the context of neoliberalism. This inevitably means a dominant focus on North American-led scholarship because, as might be expected and as we will see throughout this book, this is where the power currently lies in scholarship and the past forty years has marked the shift away from the dominance of German scholarship.