to consider recent findings from a number of disciplines, including ethnography, folkloristics, and orality studies. The thesis we will be defending is this: If, with its reports of the supernatural, one is able to remain sincerely open to the possibility (not merely the “logical” possibility, but the genuine historical possibility; see chap. 1 below) that the portrait(s) of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels is historically reliable, then, given an appropriate historical method and the evidence at hand,