Jewish World in the Time of Jesus by Charles Guignebert

From the Foreword: "The Jewish World in the Time of Jesus is one of the very few books which has not been obsolescent by the revolutionizing discoveries of ancient manuscripts in the Qumran Caves by the Dead Sea. By an extraordinary inferential anticipation, Guignebert reached the conclusion, to which honest Bible students are now reluctantly being driven, that the Judaism from whose bosom Christianity sprang was not the orthodox 'Old Testament' Judaism of an earlier time but the sectarian syncretistic Judaism expressed variously by the Essenes, Nazarenes, Coventanters, Zealots, and the pre-Christian Jewish Gnostics...This book contains Guignebert's best thinking: it is his fine and characteristic contribution to the solution of the personality of Jesus...Tis is the main message of this book--that religions came by natural evolution and not by miraculous creation by divine fiat, and that Judaism and Christianity are not only no exception to that law, but rather excellent illustrations of it."