Bios is the Greek word for "life" both in the sense of an actual lived life and a written biography. Bias is an Old French word that means "oblique," i.e., viewed from a certain angle. Metaphorically it refers to a preference or prejudice that hinders impartial judgments. When one studies Jesus, ancient bioi ("lives," plural of bios) and modern bioi interact with one another and both ancient and modern biases (those of gospel writers, famous scholars and your own) should be detected and explored in order for progress to me made. This paper invites you into this process and gives you a good excuse to narrow your choices for which book you think you might want to read for your summary and review. Here's what you need to do:
1) Do the assigned reading for the day this paper is due (Historical Jesus Theories). It is a page that fairly well summarizes the positions of several well-known Jesus scholars. Some are already somewhat familiar to you. As you read, start two lists, one for scholars and books with views you find attractive and one for scholars and books with views you find unattractive. (By the time you finish parts 1, 2, and 3, this list should have at least five books in each category and will be stapled at the back of your two page paper.)
2) Do a search using this link: Amazon Book Search. Type "Jesus history" without quotation marks in the subject area. Then go down and change the "Sort Results By" option to "Best-selling." (It is interesting to see which books are most popular.) Now do the search. This search will produce several pages of results. Scroll through several of the search result pages first just to check out the titles and see which ones seem intriguing. Then go back and click on links to some of these and read the editorial descriptions and some reader comments. Add some attractive and unattractive books to your lists.
3) Go to the course bibliography page and read over the book titles. Not every scholarly book on Jesus has "historical" or "history" in the title, so this way you can see several other intriguing titles the search did not produce and that did not get included on the Historical Jesus Theories web page. If a title interests you and you would like to know more about it, look up the book on Amazon's site and read about it. Add books to your lists if you find any you are interested in.
4) Now write your paper. Begin by reflecting on your lists. What specifically do you find attractive and unattractive about these books? (You'll probably have too many books to discuss in a two page paper, so pick the top two or three in each category.) What biases do you suspect in the approaches of their authors? What makes you think these biases are operative? Next, reflect on what your likes and dislikes say about you. What is the relationship between your bios and bias? Do you think you would learn more from reading a book you're comfortable with or one that challenges your biases? Which book are you leaning toward reading?
NB: Keep a couple of things in mind as you contemplate which book you might choose for your summary and review. First, it should be a book that is more historical than theological. To be sure, there are some books that involve both that would be acceptable. Books like Borg and Wright's The Meaning of Jesus or Luke Timothy Johnson's polemical The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and Truth of the Traditional Gospels are good examples. Also, the length of acceptable books should be from about 200-350 pages. Many books shorter than 200 pages are more popular and/or introductory than scholarly, and books longer than 350 pages are—I think you'll agree—too long to read this semester.