Emil Schürer's Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu Christi, a critical presentation of the whole evidence concerning Jewish history, institutions, and literature from 175 B.C. to A.D. 135, has rendered invaluable services to scholars for nearly a century. It had four successive German editions between 1874 and 1909, and an English translation, A History of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ, was made from the second German edition and published between 1885 and 1891.
The present work, though retaining the structure and all that is still valid of the most recent edition of the original, offers a fresh English text, and a full and integrated revision of the entire subject-matter. The bibliographies have been rejuvenated and supplemented; the sources are presented according to the latest scholarly editions with a corresponding adjustment of the argument, when necessary; and all the new archaeological, epigraphical, numismatic and literary evidence, including the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bar Kokhba documents, has been introduced into the survey. Account has also been taken of the progress in historical research, both in the classical and Jewish fields.