I aproached reading E P Sanders with some trepidation. My opinion of him was formed by N T Wright, who, by my recollection, descibed him as a key figure in restoring New Testament studies to a jewish context, but was mistaken about a, b, c, d, and e, which I don't remember. So far The Historical figure of Jesus has been very reasonable and conservative in the sense that he doesn't make any wild or bizarre claims. The most unorthodox thing so far has been that he has treated the gospels as something like historical fiction, that is, the gospel writers, when trying to make a particular point about Jesus, would make up a plausible story or invent a few of the contextual details to help flesh it out. Kind of a "based on real events" sort of thing. He makes up for this, to me at least, by not even mentioning, even in passing, the dreaded Q. (Sorry for my comma overuse. I'm trying not to use so many parentheses.)

I was struck in particular this morning by this pasage on miracles:

A lot of Christians, and possibly even more non-Christians, think that central to Christianity is the view that Jesus could perform miracles because he was more than a mere human being. We shall take walking on water as an example. A vast majority of people today think that it is impossible to walk on water. Some Christians, though by no means all, think that they are required to believe that Jesus could do so; this ability was limited to him, since he was more than human. Many non-Christians also think that Christians must believe this. Moreover, a lot of Christians and non-Christians think that the faith of the first century Christians depended on Jesus miracles.

Historically, none of this is accurate [ . . .] we shall see that in the first century Jesus' miracles were not decisive in deciding whether or not to accept his message and also that they did not 'prove' to his contemporaries that he was superhuman. The idea that he was not a real human being arose in the second century, but it was eventually condemned as heresy. [. . .] The definitive statement on this issue is that he is 'of one subtance with us as regards his manhood; like us in all respects, apart from sin' --not, 'apart from the ability to walk on water.'