One Jesus and Four Primitive Gospels

Abstract

To deal with the problem of the “historical” Jesus is to deal with the synoptic Gospels (with occasional appropriations of Johan-nine material).To use the apocryphal Gospels does not seem to be advisable, since their inclusion is beset with a number of notorious difficulties. First of all, any attempt to recover historical material from the vast sea of noncanonical tradition has proved to be an arduous labor yielding only negligible results.