Jesus Books

Recently a friend asked me for a list of the top five books on Jesus, and while the flood of books about Jesus has died down in the last decade, the choice is not easy. So I’ve got ten. This is not a list of the top ten most influential Jesus books, but if I had to limit my shelves on Jesus to ten books, I’d want these books there — and for different reasons.

1. N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God, Volume 2).
2. B.F. Meyer, The Aims of Jesus (Princeton Theological Monograph Series, 48) (Meyer has a long philosophical introduction.)
3. J. Jeremias, New Testament Theology.
4. C.H. Dodd, Founder of Christianity.
5. J.D.G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered (Christianity in the Making).
6. G.B. Caird, New Testament Theology (Clarendon Paperbacks), chp. 9.
7. G. Vermes, Jesus the Jew.
8. H.J. Cadbury, The Peril of Modernizing Jesus.
9. B. Wiebe, Messianic Ethics: Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of God and the Church in Response.
10. Dale C. Allison, Jr., Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History.

Sure, there are many more, especially if you want to look at this from seminal studies for the academic study of Jesus (Johannes Weiss, Albert Schweitzer, R. Bultmann, G. Bornkamm, W. Manson, T.W. Manson, H.J. Cadoux, M. Dibelius, R. Schnackenburg, L. Goppelt, E.P. Sanders, R.A. Horsley, J.P. Meier, M. Borg, J.P. Meier, B.D. Chilton, J.D. Crossan, E.S. Fiorenza, and on and on). But, this list is my list of the best books to read about Jesus, and they are not all that repetitive amongst themselves.

By the way, Jimmy Dunn and I are co-editors of The Historical Jesus in Recent Research (Sources for Biblical and Theological Study), a collection of seminal essays or chapters in the unfolding history of how scholars have understood Jesus.