The aim of historical Jesus research is to identify the authentic
material from which the historical figure as a social type underneath
the overlay is constructed. Pieter Craffert's anthropological
historiography offers an alternative framework for dealing with Jesus of
Nazareth as a social personage fully embedded in a first-century
Mediterranean worldview and the Gospels as cultural artefacts related to
this figure. This cross-cultural model represents a religious pattern
that refers to a family of features for describing those religious
entrepreneurs who, based on regular Altered State of Consciousness
experiences, perform a specific set of social functions in their
communities.