== competing descriptions == 

 This sentence in the lede could be better:  

 "Critical scholars offer competing descriptions of Jesus as a self-described Messiah, as the leader of an apocalyptic movement, as an itinerant sage, as a charismatic healer, and as the founder of an independent religious movement."  

 It's true that there are scholars outside the mainstream and that within mainstream scholarship there's a split about whether Jesus' eschatology was apocalyptic, but there's more agreement than this sentence suggests. The reader deserves a clear statement of the mainstream view, something like: "Most contemporary scholars of the historical Jesus consider him to have been an autonomous, charismatic founder of a Jewish restoration movement, anticipating an imminent apocalypse." This view squares with Vermes, Sanders, and Theissen. We should expand on the divergent views in the body, and for the lede we could add something like: "Other prominent scholars, however, contend that Jesus' "Kingdom of God" meant radical personal and social transformation instead of a future apocalypse." Crossan is the most important representative of this view. The idea that Jesus claimed to be the Messiah gets little play in contemporary secular scholarship, but we could deal with this idea in the body of the text. James Tabor seems to take this view.