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Much has been written about the life of Jesus in works that often claim to be historical and to employ historical methods. Yet only sometimes are the methods and the presuppositions involved made explicit. However, it has also been claimed more recently that a decisive change in our view of the nature of historical knowledge and methods has taken place, in that the modern has given way to the postmodern . After a survey of a number of books on Jesus that have raised the question of how his life should be studied historically, Alexander J. M. Wedderburn starts by looking at such claims, asking how new and how valid the insights involved in what claims to be a new historiographical epistemology in fact are, before turning to look at a number of problems raised by recent studies of the life of Jesus that are relevant for the work of the historian.

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