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On the other side stand scholars such as Joseph Klausner (1925), following R. Travers Herford (1901) and Bernhard Pick (1887), who believed that the Talmud gives some insight into Jesus as a historical individual.
On the question of references to Jesus in the Talmud, Meier considers the thesis of Joseph Klausner (1925) that some very few rabbinic sources, none earlier than about than late 2nd or early 3rd century, contain traces of the historical Jesus.
He questions the idea of a historical Jesus; in the documentary The God Who Wasn't There, Price supports a version of the Jesus myth hypothesis, suggesting that the early Christians adopted the model for the figure of Jesus from the popular Mediterranean dying-rising saviour myths of the time, such as that of Dionysus.
This led him to an investigation into the liberative and humanizing potential of the original teachings of the historical Jesus (hence his preference for the Gospel of Mark) as well as of Indian traditions, particularly the tradition of religious dissent represented by the Buddha and the medieval Bhakti Movement.
He also serves on the editorial board of The Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus (Sheffield Academic Press).
Meier's series A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus begins by invoking the methods of modern historical research to "recover, recapture, or reconstruct" the "historical Jesus." Meier suggests that such research might admit agreement of Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and agnostic scholars as to "who Jesus of Nazareth was and what he intended" (v. 1, 1991, p. 1).
Hermann Detering's site also follows current controversies from the US, such as the criticisms raised about Bart Ehrman's recent publication of Did Jesus Exist? (2012), including Robert Price's evaluation, and about the series of articles published by R. Joseph Hoffmann on his blog The New Oxonian, called The Jesus Process: A Consultation on the Historical Jesus.
William Edward Arnal and Michel Robert Desjardins in their Whose Historical Jesus? (1997) cites the book while comparing the different hypotheses on the "Qumranites", citing other scholars such as James H. Charlesworth (Jesus and the Dead Scrolls, 203) who judges that the Qumranites were one of the Essenes groups, and Hartmut Stegemann.
His work, and that of Albert Schweitzer himself mark the end of the First Quest or Old Quest into the historical Jesus.