Did the historical person Jesus really regard himself as the Son of God? What did Jesus actually stand for? And what are we to make of the early Christian conviction that, following his execution by the Romans, Jesus physically rose from the dead?

N. T. Wright's Who Was Jesus? considers these and many other questions raised by the latest wave of controversial books about Jesus, including Barbara Thiering's Jesus the Man: A New Interpretation from the Dead Sea Scrolls, A. N. Wilson's Jesus, and John Shelby Spong's Born of a Woman. Each of these books portrays a different Jesus, and each portrait is markedly different from the orthodox Christian view of him.

While Wright agrees with these authors that the real, historical Jesus has many surprises in store for institutional Christianity, he also presents solid reasons for discounting their arguments, claiming that they "fail to reach anything like the right answer" as to who Jesus was.

Written from the standpoint of professional biblical scholarship yet assuming no prior knowledge of the subject, Wright's Who Was Jesus? shows convincingly that much can be gained from a rigorous historical assessment of what the Gospels say about Jesus. This is a book to engage skeptic and believer alike.