Let's put heavyweight books in proper perspective.
Academics are competing to proudly fill up scholarly bookshelves with multiple and weighty volumes. The "Publish or Perish" university motto is obviously contaminating the world of Religion, pushing authors into printing texts that are inspired by varying degrees of liberal Christianity, less stringent than the fundamentalist's orthodoxy. Handled as other academic topics, each volume is to be consulted rather than read and bears the marks of both author and university. Campus identity is engaged and all teams are asked to occupy the field. Here, the number of printed pages and the extent of footnotes are markers of excellence. Any University without its own bindings is as Narcissus deprived of the water surface to reflect pride.
Competing academic authorities are building their personal and institutional reputation. Marking their imprint on religion, they propose slight variations around a central theme that satisfies the University standards. Each tome contains a generous ladle full of the "historical man", a Judean background, a pinch of "sources" and oral traditions, and a scoop of miracles with a final resurrection seasoning. These are the exciting ingredients they have at disposal. The result will be generously praised and criticized, leading to the conclusion that here is a "must" for any serious home or institutional library.
Academics may extensively write almost anything on Jesus, as long as they do not scratch the historicity and resurrection dogma. These are the limits of the politically correct beyond which trespassers receive thunder and lightening from the ivory tower of Knowledge.
All these publications are obviously very important as handbooks we readily consult. But having been shaped by and chosen by their elected universities, it is difficult to imagine that anything fundamentally new will ever come out of such respectable minds. The New Testament is a field where a bit more "historical imagination" is welcome. All these greatly learned teachers are however forgetting that erudition is no more than an accumulation of knowledge, whereas intelligence is the way you assemble and release it. There is no "eureka" to be found here.

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