Page "Quest for the historical Jesus" Paragraph 28

Some scholars of the third quest prefer to examine the historicity of Jesus through the lens of the Jewish heritage he may have come from.

These scholars use the archeology of Israel and the analysis of formative Jewish literature, including the Mishna, Dead Sea Scrolls, New Testament ( as a Jewish text ) and Josephus, to reconstruct the ancient worldviews of Jews in the 1st-century Roman provinces of Iudaea and Galilaea, and only afterward investigate how Jesus fits in.

The focus on Jesus ' social environment rather than on Jesus himself is an intentional methodology to increase the influence of verifiable scientific criteria for evaluating Jesus and to reduce the influence of personal subjective criteria.

Such scholars include David Bivin, Raymond E. Brown, James D. G. Dunn, Robert Eisenman, Paula Fredriksen, E. P.

Sanders, David H. Stern, Geza Vermes, and N. T. Wright.