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A Marģml Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus. Vol. 5: Probing the Authenticity of the Parables. By John P. Meier. Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016, xiii + 441 pp., $55.00.
John Meier, William K. Warren Professor of Theology (NT) at the University of Notre Dame, published his first volume in this series in 1991. He consistently predicted that his next volume would wrap things up, but he has stopped doing that with volume 5, which appeared exactly a quarter-century later. Meier's endeavor is clearly the biggest scholarly undertaking in the quest of the historical Jesus by any single individual since its inception in the late eighteenth century. It has been prolonged by a variety of challenges to Meier's health, and he thanks his doctors for their expertise, which has made it possible for him to continue with his project.
Throughout this undertaking Meier has aimed to reflect a minimal consensus that he imagines an "unpapal conclave" cloistered in the basement of the Harvard Divinity School library made up of a Protestant, Catholic, Jew, atheist (and in recent volumes, Muslim) producing, by applying as objectively as possible the standard criteria of authenticity used in historical Jesus research. He repeatedly stresses that this does not mean that other material in the Gospels is always unhistorical; frequently the historian must come to the verdict of non liquet (not clear) where there simply is not enough evidence either to authenticate or to dismiss something. In light of these ground rules, few of Meier's conclusions in the first four volumes have proved surprising, except in occasional ways that have pleased evangelicals-a ringing endorsement of the miracle tradition overall, especially with Jesus's healings and exorcisms, and a recognition that the emerging picture of Jesus is one of a robust Jewish eschatological prophet with possible hints of a messianic selfconsciousness. On this last matter, however, he has consistently tantalized his readers with promises of clarification in his ever-postponed final volume.
Volume 5, as Meier himself recognizes, breaks dramatically from this tradition. The parables of Jesus have regularly been identified as...