Jerusalem School of Synoptic Research and His milieu spoke Aramaic, however that Hebrew was spoken and even important is not unique to the Jerusalem School of Synoptic Research. Many more New Testament Scholars worldwide have increasingly affirmed the importance of Jewish culture for the understanding of Jesus. John P. Meier is exemplary of this significant trend when he poignantly criticizes scholarship in the twentieth century that has paid lip service to the 'Jewish Jesus' but has not really fleshed this out, stating that if we do not have a halachic Jesus, we don't have an historical Jesus. The third assumption of the Jerusalem School basically
God Is Not Great conceive, and bear a son" (see ), pointing out where the stories converge, Old Testament to New. Comparing the Testaments, he considers the New Testament "also a work of crude carpentry, hammered together long after its purported events, and full of improvised attempts to make things come out right". He points out that, while H. L. Mencken considered some of the New Testament events to be historically verifiable, Mencken maintained that "most of them ... show unmistakable signs of having been tampered with". Hitchens also outlines the inaccuracy in Luke's attempt to triangulate three world events of the time with