The implications are not really making their way down to popular media or to academic circles, so Hutchinson set out to explore items like the Gabriel Revelation and the implication those discoveries have on the standard academic suspicion of the historicity and reliability of items found in the biblical gospels' narratives.
Critics have spent a century questioning that New Testament narrative, Hutchinson claims, based on the claim that the story surrounding Jesus' divinity and the reason for his crucifixion were conjured up after the fact -- something that he believes the tablet dismisses. So Searching for Jesus attempts to explore all of the ways in which the literary and historical accounts of the Jesus narratives are reliable.
Many of the fundamental assumptions that have guided New Testament research over 100 or 150 years were being challenged by the skeptical scholars themselves. So Searching for Jesus gives ample evidence of the way those challenges are reframing how scholars understand the biblical narratives about Jesus that we find in the gospels.
Critiques of the Bible came from discoveries that were made by critical scholars a century ago, Hutchinson argues. Those critics have therefore made unproven assumptions about those finds, which were perpetuated for decades in the halls of academia.
Searching for Jesus is an honest, straight-forward and critical look at those presumptions in a very accessible form. This is the one book that those who may be looking at Jesus again should pick up and read.
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