The Jesus legend : a case for the historical reliability of the synoptic Jesus tradition

Summary: The authors examine the claims of Jesus myth theorists in detail, but also launch an all-out assault on the assumptions of Gospel literary critics who teach that the oral tradition leading up to the formation of the Gospels was fundamentally unreliable. The book charges that these assumptions were not based on solid historical research, but rather on the biases of a small but influential groups of Eurocentric, ethnocentric academic elites who imposed modern literary models on an ancient oral culture. Using recent intercultural, interdisciplinary studies on the nature of ancient oral tradition, the authors demonstrate convincingly that, although the period of oral tradition for the Gospels was relatively short, lengthy stories were often handed down very accurately over long periods of time. These new studies in oral tradition call into question the way scholars have assessed the formation of the Gospels through out the last century.