WRT Jesus, for reals

I am under the impression that several of this blog's readers have nonzero knowledge or interest in the topic of the Historical Jesus: the ancient Jewish prophet and rabble-rouser. No more divine than you or I, perhaps, but apparently possessing of a remarkable presence, and maybe a shocking orator for his time, so outrageous that the authorities saw it necessary to silence him.

To you I ask: if I wanted to read a really solid, secular account of the life of this man, where would I turn?

I suppose I would prefer non-fiction, but fiction is OK, so long as it's appropriately informed. Specific books and chapters of the New Testament are also OK to recommend. Assume I know nothing. I am coming at this not so much raw as tinted. I carry nearly 20 years of actively Christian education and upbringing and all its attendant assumptions in my personal baggage, and I have never really properly unpacked it.

(Is this for a project? Yes, it is for a project.)

And

I appreciate the kind words and sympathy regarding my mother. Thank you.

I don't know what will happen but I am confident that it will be as OK as it can, because I don't stand alone.

Wait, "Blog"?

• If I have been using LJ more, it's largely because I've finally gotten around to subscribing to various LJ-friends' (and, increasingly, Dreamwidth-friends') RSS feeds, using the proper kung-fu that allows the reading of locked posts therein. It's a small hassle to treat every "friend" as a separate blog, but since I've gotten used to curating a long list of incoming feeds over the last couple of years, it's doable. (I never got any full-friends-page subscription magic to work in a way that made me happy.)

• That said, I'm likely to try again to launch a new personal blog on www.jmac.org, sometime in 2011. I last tried it three years ago and didn't get anywhere, but I have new reasons now to try again, and new directions to take it. The top of my personal-project stack, which has been waiting patiently for me to finally finish Warbler, is the top-to-bottom remodeling of www.jmac.org. I've talked a good talk on this before, but it's been many years since I've done anything other than applying new CSS or rewording the front page a little. It's still too much the website of who I was in 1999. Needs less "I am jmac, and I seek the holy grail" and more "I am jmac, and I sit resplendent in my glory." You know how it is.