It’s a commonplace observation, and yet somehow still a shocking one: In all of human civilization, no subject has been written and talked about more than the death of Jesus Christ. A typical subject you might study in graduate school—presidential politics, say, or the poetry of William Wordsworth—will occupy four or five shelves of a well-stocked university library. The death of Jesus generates that much material every decade and has done so for centuries. Many scholars and theologians, of course, don’t believe the New Testament to be a reliable witness to the historical Jesus’ words and deeds, and their theories are many and diverse: Jesus was a political revolutionary, a countercultural philosopher, a crusading ascetic. Even if we confine ourselves to definably Christian interpretations, however, we are still faced with a multi-layered body of doctrine and textual interpretation that, nearly 20 centuries after the event, continues to inspire worldwide scholarly inquiry—and at times fierce debate.

Source: Beyond the Cross | The Weekly Standard