In 2022, I began to put some of my thoughts about this topic on paper. I knew I wanted to deal with the relationship between the historical Jesus and Second Temple sectarianism. I also wanted to incorporate aspects of my study of Jewish wisdom literature. I soon realized, however, that a book restricting itself to my academic engagement with faith would have been less than honest–dishonest, at least, for a person whose academic career was not articulated with the scholarly community that owns the topic. I decided to use a part of my Christian experience as a sort of backboard, a surface against which I could bounce some of developing thoughts.

The part of my life that I selected was my exposure, over a period of about five years, to American Evangelicalism. In my late teens and early twenties, I was a student at Moody Bible Institute and at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. I set myself two tasks. The first was to describe, as openly as I could, what I went through in those years. The second was to trace the affect of these experiences on the development of my later ideas about who Jesus was.