"The claim that Jesus was criticised by the Pharisees for performing Sabbath cures has been emphatically repeated for over 2,000 years. But a careful, unprejudiced evaluation of the Gospels - the only source for this accusation - shows that the historical Jesus was never criticised by historical Pharisees for performing Sabbath cures and that both the Pharisees and Jesus agreed that Sabbath cures must be performed. The Sabbath healing events in the Gospels have in fact preserved a significant part of the history of the post-biblical Jewish debate which sought to reconcile the apparently mutually irreconcilable demands of Jewish law and the need to perform deeds of healing and/or saving life, which is the subject of this book"--