Jesus Christ
By anyone's account, Jesus of Nazareth is the most significant person who has ever lived.He has influenced more lives and had more written about him than any other person inhistory. He is the only one who ever made a credible claim to being more than just anotherhuman being and to this day almost a billion people revere him as the supreme revelationof God. The purpose of this article is to provide a summary of Jesus' life and his basicteachings, with each topic being introduced by a short account of the modern discussionthat surrounds it. Introducing the whole is a brief discussion of the nature of thesources from which Jesus' life and teachings are derived and concluding it is a discussionof who Jesus understood himself to be.
The Nature of the Sources. The primary sources for the life of Jesus are andwill probably always be the four Gospels of the New Testament. New discoveries are madeperiodically, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Gnostic Scriptures at Nag Hammadi, butimmensely valuable as they are, they tell us nothing new about Jesus. They are either toolate in time, too tangential, too geographically distant, or too obviously a distortion ofmore traditional Christian thought to be of much value. Some of this material has beenavailable for a long time and has been made available in such works as R. McL. Wilson's NewTestament Apochrypha (2 vols.), but no one was inclined to rewrite the story of Jesuson the basis of that. Other fragmentary material from Jewish and pagan sources is alsowell known and has a certain corroborative value that is quite helpful. We learn thatJesus lived during the reign of Tiberius Caesar (a.d. 14-37) somewhere in Palestine; thathe was a religious leader who worked miracles and exorcised demons and was later regardedas a deity by his followers; that he was executed by crucifixion by the Jewish and Romanauthorities during a Passover season; that reports circulated about his resurrection fromthe dead. All of this is very helpful, even if the Christian faith is sometimes describedby these very sources as an unfounded superstition, because in its own way it reflectswhat Christians believes. It does not add anything new to what we know about Jesus,however. For that, one must turn to the four Gospels.
Because the Gospels are basically the only sources we possess for the life of Jesus,the question inevitably arises concerning reliability. Regarding this, four things can besaid. First, there is no agreed definition of reliability. Everyone approaches sourcesfrom a point of view that either includes, excludes, or leaves open the possibility ofwhat is recorded. Given Christian presuppositions, the story makes perfect sense; givennon-Christian presuppositions, the rejection of the sources as unreliable isunderstandable. It is not really a question of the sources, but a question of theinterpreter of the sources. Second, the Gospel writers and their subject matter argue infavor of their truthfulness. They were attempting to present a true account of the One whoclaimed to be the Truth, did so on the basis of careful research ( Luke 1:1-4 ), andwere willing to die for the results of their efforts. That does not necessarily make ittrue, but it does mean they were not inventing things they knew to be false. Third, thechurch from the beginning believed that God had a hand in the writing of the material andthat guaranteed its trustworthiness. This does not make it so, but that belief did arisefrom contact with those who knew Jesus and contact with the risen Jesus who confirmed intheir own experience what the sources said about him as incarnate. If they were right inthis, it confirms the reliability of the sources. Fourth, the Gospels are all we have. Ifthey are allowed to speak for themselves, they present a consistent picture that gave riseto the Christian faith and has been confirmed in the lives of believers from that day tothis. The simple fact is, there is no other Jesus available than the one presented in theGospels. Either that is accepted or one creates his or her own Jesus on the basis of whatis thought to be possible or likely. It might be a Jesus acceptable to the modern orpostmodern mind, but it will not be the Jesus of the Gospels.
The Gospels as sources are what they are, shot through with supernatural occurrencesfrom beginning to end and they present a Jesus who is both powerful and puzzling to ourmodern mind. They ought to be examined with the utmost care, but allowed to speak forthemselves and appreciated for what they are, documents written from within the faith,honestly depicting what they believed Jesus said and did, to the best of theirrecollection.
The Life of Jesus. The Search for the Real Jesus. From the time whenJesus lived until the eighteenth century it would never have occurred to anyone to searchfor a real Jesus. The Gospels were considered to be divinely inspired, accurate accountsof Jesus' life; hence, the real Jesus was found by reading them. A change occurred withthe coming of the Enlightenment that no longer saw the truth of the Gospels as guaranteedby God. They were to be read as any other book; the supernatural elements were to bediscounted entirely or taken as myths or symbols of some higher truth. This meant that thereal Jesus, a Jesus fully explainable in human terms, had to be disentangled from thepious, but historically inaccurate elements that smothered him.