text: Despite the fact that Hanegraaff's name is the bigger of the two on the front cover, only the first 40 pages of this very small book are worth reading, and they are the writing of Paul Maier.  His research is helpful, but so limited in scope that you wonder if he wasn't given a week-end to write it and come up with as much as he could.  Every topic needs futher information.  A lot more could be said, and Maier seems to be the kind of scholar who could have done a lot more.
  
  Hanegraaff contributes 29 pages of defense of the historical Jesus which is an even more surface-level reworking of information covered much better elsewhere.
  
  That said, I would give this book to someone who isn't much of a reader but for whom The Da Vinci Code has raised some questions.  It isn't much more than a collection of scattered soundbites, but that may have been a good marketing strategy when there is already such a proliferation of secondary literature on what was only a piece of pulp fiction
  