Who do you say that I am? If you're looking for a good read on Jesus--other than the gospels of course--a trip to the bookstore might be in order.

WHEN IT COMES TO DESCRIBING CURRENT BOOKS on Jesus, Dickens may have said it best: "It was the best of times. It was the worst of times." Biblical scholars and their colleagues in history, archaeology, and the social sciences have uncovered a treasure trove of information about the politics, economics, culture, religion, and literature of first-century Palestine and can tell us so much more about the world in which Jesus lived and died. We also have a much richer sense of Jesus' Jewish identity and of the complex and changing network of relationships within the Jewish community of his day, of the interplay and conflicts between the Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, and Zealots, and of the ways these groups collaborated with or resisted the Herodians and Romans.

And yet for all this knowledge we seem to have even less certitude about who Jesus was. The Jesus Seminar and the quest for the historical Jesus have generated a wide range of positions about the identity of Jesus, only to be challenged or debunked by scholars who argue that the project is fundamentally flawed and that attempts to find the Jesus behind or before the gospels collapses into navel-gazing.

Still, the present difficulties have not discouraged Jewish or Christian scholars or writers from wrestling with Jesus' identity. Over the last century biblical scholars have canceled the quest for the historical Jesus more than once only to have a younger generation pick up the gauntlet anew, and last year a fresh crop of writers and academics once again reached out to find the Jesus of Nazareth who became the Christ of faith.

In Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (Riverhead, 2005) longtime literary critic Harold Bloom argues that the only way to understand Jesus, or Yeshua of Nazareth, is to see him not as the founder of Christianity--a role Bloom assigns to the Jesus Christ created by an early Christianity shaped by Greek, not Hebrew, thought--but as the last great Jewish thinker, as a brilliant follower and interpreter of Yahweh.

Bloom, a cultural Jew who no longer trusts in the religious covenant that sustained his mother's faith, remains haunted by the untamed Yahweh he finds at the heart of the Hebrew scriptures, and in a short, brilliant, angry, and often outrageous book he challenges Christians who think of the Hebrew scriptures as a preface to the New Testament by arguing that the gospels are but a footnote to the Torah.

For Bloom, Christianity is a weak stepchild of Judaism, and it is only possible to grasp Yeshua of Nazareth when we see him as the fully Jewish rabbi whose identity and mission are immersed in his commitment to Yahweh. Catholic readers will find many of Bloom's arguments and assertions unsettling, disturbing, and occasionally preposterous. Still, there is something bracing about a 74-year-old scholar who cannot let go of the God he thinks has let go of him. Fidelity comes in all sorts of shapes.

GOD, IT WOULD SEEM, HAS ALSO BEEN HAUNTING popular novelist Anne Rice. More than 40 years after she abandoned the Catholic faith of her childhood, the author of more than two dozen bestsellers about vampires, mummies, and devils returned to the church and set out to sink her teeth into an historical novel about Jesus.

Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt (Knopf, 2005) is a coming-of-age narrative in which an 8-year-old Yeshua returns to Nazareth from Alexandria full of questions about his past and his strange unfolding powers and traumatized by the violence of his homeland. What drove his family into exile in Egypt? Why will his mother and Joseph not answer any questions about his birth, or about the whispers he hears about angels and dreams? How does he know things he has not learned or do things no other child can do?

Rice's novel benefits from her thick reading of contemporary scholarship, and she has immersed her Yeshua (and readers) in a Jerusalem and Galilee full of the sights, sounds, and smells of ordinary and faithful Jews struggling to make their way and living amidst the political and religious tumult of the day. We have a rich feel for the routines and perils of daily life under Roman and Herodian rulers at war with Zealot rebels, and we come to see Yeshua of Nazareth as a Jew among Jews, a brilliant young student of the rabbis with an uncanny gift for mystical prayer. Still, as Rice's title shows, hers is ultimately a tale of the Christ of the gospels, a story of the Son of God coming to an awareness of his identity and mission as Lord and Messiah.

IN PROPHET AND TEACHER: AN INTRODUCTION TO the Historical Jesus (Westminster) biblical scholar William Herzog, who acknowledges all the problems with trying to find the Jesus behind and before the gospels, has set out to uncover a radical and prophetic Jesus who is haunted by a vision of God's reign that challenges the economic and political systems of his day (and ours). With a scholarly knowledge of the gospels and a firm grasp of contemporary social-science research on first-century Palestine, Herzog introduces us to a Jesus who is deeply grounded in the covenantal justice of Moses and the prophets, and who encourages the oppressed and chastises their oppressors.

Jesus the prophet, teacher, and healer tells parables that uncover and challenge the social injustices imbedded in the political, economic, and religious structures of his day; he encourages practices that resist the oppression of the Romans, Herodians, and high priests; and he follows a path that puts him in direct conflict with all those who trod on the weak and crush the lowly. Herzog's Jesus is fully and completely grounded in his Jewish roots and faith, but he is also a prophet who speaks through the gospels to those who practice injustice in our own day.

This is a Jesus demanding we work to make the worst of times into the best of times.

McCORMICK'S QUICK TAKES

These recent books explore Jesus' life and the world he lived in.

Jesus and Yahweh (Riverhead, 2005)

Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt (Knopf, 2005)

Prophet and Teacher (Westminster, 2005)

By PATRICK McCORMICK, professor of Christian ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.