The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah

The book runs to two large volumes and moves through the life of Jesus in order, but its distinguishing feature is the apparatus around the narrative: extended treatments of the Jewish world of the first century — the synagogue, the Temple service, the schools, the sects, the calendar, the messianic expectation as the rabbis actually formulated it.

Edersheim’s appendices, particularly the collection of rabbinic passages applied to the Messiah, were the part later scholars used most. He works directly from Talmudic and midrashic literature at a time when very few writers in English could, and he uses it not as decoration but as the context that makes particular sayings and controversies intelligible.

It is not a work of apologetics in the argumentative sense; it makes its case by reconstruction. Its scholarship has been superseded in places over a century and a half, and its polemical asides against contemporary Judaism have not aged well, but it remains in print because nothing quite replaced what it set out to do.

The eighth edition is free at Archive.org as a scan of two volumes; its OCR mangles the Hebrew, the Greek and the two-column footnotes. Our edition is set from that same eighth edition, corrected against the page images, with the Hebrew and Greek in their own scripts.

The text

This edition is set from the eighth edition, revised, of The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah (Longmans, Green, and Co., New York): volume I from the printing of 1906 and volume II from that of 1917. Both volumes were read from scans of those printings at the Internet Archive.

Hebrew and Greek

Edersheim quotes Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek on almost every page, and scanning software turns all of it into gibberish. We located about 1,000 of these places and read each one from the image of the printed page. Where a quotation was uncertain we re-read its whole printed line. The Hebrew and Greek are set in their own scripts, as Edersheim printed them.

Repairing the scan

The English was checked against the page images. More than 4,000 damaged words were corrected, from systematic misreadings (æ and ü dropped from names such as Judæa and Schürer, a capital E read as H) to words garbled one by one. About 400 of the book's two-column footnote blocks had been read across the columns and run into the main text; each was rebuilt from the page and set back as a linked footnote. Some 400 marginal Scripture and Talmud references were re-read from the page margins, and the List of Authorities, 461 entries, was proofread against the original.

What is not included

The indexes are omitted, because their page numbers have no meaning in an ebook. Names that have a settled modern form are given in it (Judea, Perea, Caesar; Quran for Koran); otherwise Edersheim’s words are unchanged.