Jesus in Asia
By RS Sugirtharajah
Harvard University Press, 311pp, £21.95/$30
The quest for the historical Jesus has been an obsession of Western scholarship since the 19th century. Judging from RS Sugirtharajah’s splendid new book, it would seem that writers and thinkers in Asia beat the West to the punch by many centuries.
Attempts to interpret Jesus’s life did not follow the rules and regulations later developed in Europe and America. There was none of the “heavy artillery of historical criticism”. This, Sugirtharajah suggests, is one reason why this particular tradition has been largely ignored.
