Two types of books on Jesus of Nazareth circulate among Spanish language readers. One, the majority, written by authors of one or another Christian denomination. Another, minority, made up of studies of independent non-denominational authors, but who try not to be militant, in favor of an option that exposes the results of an approach to Jesus obtained with the same means used to study other biographies or similar books of famous people. of antiquity. Putting at the public's disposal a brief but fairly complete overview of what is being written in Spanish at the moment is therefore the purpose of these Other Approaches.
This overview is accordingly divided into two sections. The first contains positive and negative assessments regarding the works on Jesus by confessional authors, that is, dependent on the faith of a particular church. The second offers, through historical analysis, other approaches to the character that the author defends as closer to his historical figure and that do not depend on any church. Now, this second part is also critical. It is about building a picture of Jesus on the basis of what we can reasonably know about him today using all the usual tools of ancient history research.
The list of commented books is not very large considering that about a thousand books are written about Jesus a year, although most of them have no historical value. With the books presented here, the author believes that the reader already has enough intellectual tools to form an idea of ​​how the investigation of the Jesus of history should proceed today. The image of the Nazarene obtained from this critical set is written with the full awareness that his life, even being that of a historically remote character, is fully alive in the vast majority of Christians. Therefore, that life continues to be interesting for itself.