Searching for the Historical Jesus

My wife and watched this course as a review prior to a trip to Israel later this year. We are both clergy and have seen and enjoyed multiple Great Courses over the past 20 years. What a disappointment. Especially after the other religious, historical and philosophical courses we have viewed. And especially because he is endorsed by National Geographic. The "scholar" was smarmy and offensive in his presentation of the truth of Jesus and his ministry. His hubristic pontifications about what truly happened are ridiculous. This came to the climax with his description of Jesus' miraculous healings being better explained by Jesus' manipulating the electromagnetic fields along the lines of far eastern practitioners. I cannot believe that the editorial control of the Great Courses and Wondrium are not better equipped to eliminate this kind of pseudo-scholastic waste from you offerings, Sincerely, William Bell

It took about 30 seconds to figure out that this video treats the gospels as historical documents, which has been thoroughly disproved. This video has nothing to do with history.

This should be titled 'Searching for the christian Jesus' - it is entirely from a christian perspective, not so much a scholarly one. There are much better lecture series on this topic available here - anything by Bart D. Ehrman is good but everything else I've seen is better than this.

Based on the title, I expected to see Jesus's life from a historian's perspective. In actuality, this series more closely resembles the fables and stories that were told by the nuns at a Catholic Grade School in the 40's and 50's. On the one hand, Isbouts does present a number of interesting hypotheses. The major problem is that the hypotheses are portrayed as known facts or at the very least as plausible scenarios. The bottom line is that this series is at best historical fiction and at worst Christian apologetics. The title is grossly misleading.

I foiund this series quite enjoyable, up to episode 10 where it came about Jesus' healing miracles. The lecturer tries to explain them as historically and scientifically plausible, because Jesus used some kind of energy healing similar to Reiki, chakra manipulation, etc. I have no idea why Wondrium allowed this to pass their internal "quality control". With such esoteric nonsense, I cannot recommend this series at all.

The visuals are stunning. That said, this is not a presentation of Jesus, the historical events of the time and place when he lived etc. using vetted historical sources. The primary source material is the gospels! Additionally, the presenter posits an underlying assumption that the fundamentals of Christian beliefs are true. This is religion, not history.

I bought this assuming that it was a typical "Great Course" but it is not. The sessions are shorter and not academic at all. Its clearly a tourist video and I believe it should have been offered as such instead of being called a Great Course.

I was hoping more of an "what can be proved today". So what is history/facts, what is "story-telling". The premise of this course is: Jesus existed, everything in the bible is true, so how would it have looked like. For me a journey to a historical Jesus would start with: did he exist, what proof do we have except for some gospels written down a lot, lot later, changed over history, contradicting each other... So this was disappointing...

I appreciate the attempt here to narrate the historical Jesus. However, he fudges at some pretty key points. For example, when there is a pretty strong case to be made via the oldest gospel (Mark) and Paul's letters that both somehow fail to even speak of Jesus' birth or any angels flying about, the author just glosses over it and spends his time with Matthew and Luke, whose narratives came later when the church was aiming toward making Jesus the Son of Man. This isn't about history.

You need to have some existing level of understanding regarding the life of Jesus in both a biblical and historical context in order to get the most out of this. It's generally decent, and the academic information, is usually well sourced if not at least plausible, and even the speculative elements are generally well portrayed. I do say generally because some of the elements of speculation are demonstrably subjective and used only to build a narrative. It's clear that there was an intention to form the story of Jesus on the basis of realism, and while as a Christian myself I do believe such a thing is possible, I fear that at times (IE: The electromagnetism episode you have no doubt read about in other reviews) it tries way too hard to explain away things using...questionable reasoning. From the perspective of documentary film making the film is good, although it's a fair analogy of the academic state too. It's about as good in videographic composition as it is in the truth of it's content. It's ok. The performative structure is obviously being used to validate the building of the narrative, and confidence is being used to fulfil a sense of cohesion as to what parts require speculation. Overall that is a stylistic choice and is personally fine by me so long as the audience has the film production knowledge to understand why. To others, it can come across as foolish, and frustrating but it goes with the territory of it being informative entertainment. I cannot tell if Jean-Pierre Isbouts has filmmaking knowledge overall because his structure and performative style suggest a study of film, and his framing is usually very good but the overall inconsistent framing, occasionally poor audio, lighting, and poor adaptation of images into film (applying a slight motion such as zoom to still images in order not to break up pacing is documentary 101) suggest this is a first try or cheap production. There are some really weird drone shots with horrible mechanical camera movements because they didn't use a gimbal juxtaposed by some beautifully lit, sweeping drone shots of landmarks that are stunning and well captured. In that sense, from a craft perspective, it's generally fine and mostly good. The documentary fulfils its main function as an overarching narrative of the life of Jesus from a contextually historical platform. It uses a generally balanced mixture of academia, informed opinion and hypothesis to paint a theoretical picture of the life of Jesus and doesn't stray away from accepting the times when historical facts and biblical stories don't overlap. It does so without diminishing the Gospels as a source in their own right as I have seen before. This is good for people who are able to think objectively about the documentary they are watching, you have to use your brain. I think, despite its failings, it's quite good although it's disappointing at times. 6.5/10