Academic books on Jesus continue to proliferate. In this one, the last of three appendixes lists such books, most published since 1970: their number comes to about 140. Messias Jesus should be ranked high among them.
The author has already contributed to this discussion, most notably with Jesus als Lehrer (3rd. ed., 1988; 4th ed. to appear in 2020). This earlier book treated Jesus’s putative Messianität in a significant subsection (see esp. pp. 298–352). In the book under review, Riesner takes this up as the main theme, dividing his study into 15 chapters. These cover (1) messianic hopes going back to King David, (2) the origins of Jesus’s messianic identity, (3) Jesus’s messianic call, (4) the beginnings of Jesus’s ministry, (5) the reign of God, (6) the family of God and the will of God, (7) Jesus’s circle of students, (8) the Galilean mission and crisis, (9) the revelation of...
