Twenty years after his pioneering work on 'Jesus the Jew', the leading Jewish scholar of the New Testament and the Dead Sea Scrolls trains his attention on Jesus' own religious life as it can be gleaned from the accounts in the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke. With his sharp historical sense and unrivaled knowledge of mainstream and Essene Judaism, Vermes sketches Jesus' personal presence and power, his regard for law, his practice of healing, his creative understanding of the kingdom, his images of God, his eschatalogical zeal the very well-springs of Jesus' own ardour and religious vision.