As scholars reconsider quests for the historical Jesus amid critiques of the “criteria of authenticity,” this paper suggests that they should first take fuller account of the notion of “authenticity” itself and its place within the moral assumptions of contemporary Western cultures. The paper shows how the search for an authentic Jesus emerged out of a wider cultural backdrop in which Western societies increasingly prized the notion of authenticity as a moral value. More fully recognizing how the historical Jesus search implicitly absorbed cultural assumptions about authenticity enables more reflexive scholarship on the historical Jesus. While some have investigated various assumptions about authenticity within biblical scholarship, few biblical scholars have explored authenticity’s signal importance in Western moral sensibilities. Anthony Le Donne, for example, probes German Protestant accounts of authenticity by showing how they relate to concerns about originality, and how distinctive American concerns arose around authenticity that connected to scriptural inerrancy. Such analyses helpfully show the cultural concerns at play as the “criteria for authenticity” was taking clearer shape. Analyses of authenticity should not end here, however. “Authenticity” is a notion with connotations beyond biblical studies, a notion that Western cultures have increasingly prized in recent centuries. Charles Taylor offers a careful account of this rise in his book The Ethics of Authenticity. He shows how Western culture and philosophy came to view each person as having “an original way of being human,” beginning during the 18th century (Ethics of Authenticity, Harvard University Press: 1991, 28). This same period also saw a dramatic rise in usage of the term authenticity, starting around 1745. What Le Donne shows about originality and authenticity, for example, related to these wider shifts in the moral landscape of European values during the 18th century. Meanwhile new lines of historical research gave rise to hopes that “what really happened” in the life of Jesus in the first century could be uncovered. This promise of historical authenticity aligned and mixed with these wider cultural shifts regarding individual authenticity. Recognizing this intellectual history enables more reflexive research. It shows again how contingencies of Western culture shaped quests for the historical Jesus, in this case how Western ideas of authenticity became projected onto Jesus searches. Recognizing these contingencies enables scholars to assess more ably what texts from vastly different cultures—like gospels—can and cannot provide. Since authenticity as we know it today did not convey the moral weight in the 1st century that it does now, 1st century texts might not be able to provide an account of an individualized, self-actualized Jesus. The search for authenticity belongs to modern Westerners.