Nick Perrin begins by asking 'Who was Jesus?' and recounts the three answers given to that question in contemporary Jesus scholarship: Jesus was a social thinker teaching a message of radical egalitarianism (Crossan, Borg); Jesus was a preacher of the restoration of the temple (Sanders); and Jesus was the Messiah (Wright). He suggests that these three answers can in fact be integrated if Jesus first and foremost saw himself and his movement as a reconstitution of the temple. By viewing Jesus as temple, we gain an enriched understanding of his ministry, teachings, death and resurrection. Whereas modern history of Jesus research has tended to separate the historical Jesus from the proclamation of the early church, and puzzled over this disjunction, Perrin's account effectively closes the historical gap between founder and movement, between 'Jesus' and 'Christ'.