Aslan sets out to write the life of Jesus of Nazareth as a historian would, against colleagues who hold that the man behind the faith is unrecoverable and that only the Christ of belief is available to study. He concedes the difficulty: the evidence is fragmentary, most of the picture has to be inferred, and Bultmann's warning that scholars keep finding the Jesus they were looking for hangs over the attempt.

His method is to strip the gospels of their theological shaping and set Jesus inside first-century Palestine, in a Judea already sliding toward open revolt against Rome. The book opens not with a nativity but with an assassination, and with the Temple itself — its tiered courts, its money changers, its industrial-scale blood sacrifice and the hereditary priesthood that lived off all of it. The figure who emerges, Aslan grants, will not much resemble the Jesus of modern devotion.