For decades, biblical theologians have used the tools of historical criticism to drive a wedge between the Jesus of history and the Jesus of faith. Now, thanks to the work of St. Paul Center Fellow Dr. Brant Pitre, those same tools are being used to demonstrate that no such wedge ever truly existed. There has always been only one Jesus, the Jesus of history and faith. 

In his newest book, Jesus and the Last Supper, Pitre sets out to answer four questions: 1) What is the relationship between Jesus and Judaism? 2) Who did Jesus think He was? 3) What did Jesus expect to happen in the future? And 4) What is the relationship between Jesus and the early Church?
       Ever since the advent of the historical-critical method, those four questions have been at the heart of scholarly attempts to understand the man Jesus apart from the Church. By viewing those questions through the prism of the Last Supper accounts, however, Pitre shines a light on Jesus’ humanity that is as Catholic as it is intellectually rigorous. 

Funded, in part, by a grant from the St. Paul Center, Jesus and the Last Supper is earning rave views from scholars across the Christian world.

Catholic participation in the Jesus quest has hereby finally borne its hoped-for fruit, with enormous implications for all Christians. Pitre should win the Ratzinger Prize for this book alone.

—Matthew Levering, Mundelein Seminary

With Jesus and the Last Supper, Brant Pitre constructs a bridge from the best scholarship of previous generations to the most promising possibilities of the present. This book is nothing less than a blueprint for resurrecting Jesus studies in the twenty-first century.

—Anthony LeDonne, United Theological Seminary

Brant Pitre’s contribution is provocative in the best sense of the word. At every turn readers will find new observations worth pondering and new arguments worth weighing…No one will come away from this volume without having learned much. 

—Dale Allison, Jr., Princeton Theological Seminary