Eds., Ward Blanton, James G. Crossley and Halvor Moxnes. The link between historical Jesus studies and the broader cultural contexts has been largely lost in contemporary scholarship, with the heritage of the Jesus scholarship from the nineteenth century being detached from its cultural context and with the history of Jesus scholarship being buried as a topic in the development of methods and issues in New Testament studies. As a result most presentations of the historical Jesus are historiographically and hermeneutically naïve, assuming an #objective# posture, with little or no reflection on their ideological presuppositions. Therefore, consciously or unconsciously, they often represent hegemonic positions. This collection of essays starts from a different position, by questioning the use of presentations of Jesus to defend and protect hegemonic or mono-cultural contexts, and thereby explicitly or implicitly favour a development towards a more inclusive society for persons from different ethnic, racial, national, gender and sexual orientation backgrounds. This collection of essays will look at the cultural and ideological beginnings of historical Jesus studies in the nineteenth century and expose the underlying presuppositions of hegemony in contemporary presentations of Jesus, viewed from the perspective of #cultural complexity#. Contents: 1. Ward Blanton, James G. Crossley, and Halvor Moxnes, #Introduction# 2. Thomas Hylland Eriksen, #What is cultural complexity?# 3. Halvor Moxnes, #What is it to write a biography of Jesus? Schleiermacher#s Life of Jesus and 19th century nationalism# 4. Peter Normann Waage, #Dostoyevsky and the Russian Christ# 5. Hugh Pyper, #Why Jesus was not a Scot: Herder, central European nationalism, and the Aryan Christ# 6. Ward Blanton, #Schweitzer#s Jesus, the crisis of modernism and beyond# 7. Leif E. Vaage, #Beyond nationalism: Jesus the #Holy Anarchist#?# 8. William E. Arnal, #Jesus as Battleground in a Period of Cultural Complexity# 9