This book grapples with the greatest puzzle of modern religious scholarship. Who was Jesus? To answer the question, author John P. Meier imagines the following scenario: Suppose that a Catholic, a Protestant, a Jew an agnostic all honest historians cognizant of first century religious movements were locked up in the bowels of the Harvard Divinity School Library and not allowed to emerge until they had hammered out a consensus on who Jesus of Nazareth was and what he intended A Marginal Jew is what Meier thinks that document would reveal.