Who Jesus Was and Is

As Christians, we say we believe we believe in the empty tomb. To do so we profess faith in the historic life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Jesus is not just a noble idea, but a real historical person. So, we should expect that many will want to ask further historical questions. As we consider who Jesus is to us, I think a few historical questions are in order as the historic data on Jesus’ life does point to a rabbi killed as a criminal.

There have been a few major attempts to reconstruct the Jesus of history. The first came with the enlightenment and the rise of science and history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which gave rise to a number of authors writing a Life of Jesus by the nineteenth century. These attempts to create a fuller picture of who Jesus was were dealt a stunning rebuke by Albert Schweitzer. Before he became a doctor, medical missionary and Nobel Peace prize winner, Schweitzer was a New Testament scholar.

In 1906 at the age of 31 Schweitzer wrote, The Quest of the Historical Jesus. He concluded that when we look down the well of history, we don’t see the image of Jesus shining back. Instead, we see our own image. He felt that everyone who looks for the Jesus’ of history describes their own ideal person. Schweitzer considered the Jesus of History unusable to the church. He felt this so strongly that he left New Testament scholarship behind, studied medicine and went to work in Gabon, Africa as a medical missionary. It was Schweitzer’s way to put behind him the Jesus of history to serve the Christ of faith. The scholar turned physician said he went to Africa to become, “a fisher of men.”

But scholars being scholars, The New Quest, was founded by those who wanted to focus on sayings and not deeds. As this group of scholars considered what Jesus said, they valued more highly those sayings that were dissimilar to Judaism and to Christianity assuming that if what Jesus said didn’t sound like other Jewish teachers or the early Christian church then the saying must be authentic. They also looked for multiple sources for each quote as a greater sign of reliance.

A later subset of this New Quest is the well-published group, known as The Jesus Seminar who cranked out books from the early 1990s until today. The Jesus Seminar took a vote and decided that few sayings in the Bible are authentically from Jesus. The group rejects Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as being reliable sources for understanding the historical Jesus. They give preference to the Gospel of Thomas, which orthodox Christianity had rejected centuries ago, as that work is a collection of sayings, which they value more than stories of a life. The group sought to uncover the real Jesus who has been described by the seminar members as a “spirit person,” “subversive sage,” and a “social prophet.”

There has more recently been a Third Quest for the Historical Jesus that is reconstructing the first century Palestinian social and political context. The question is, “What could Jesus have thought given his background and setting?” For those in this Third Quest, sayings of Jesus that are plausibly Jewish are no longer discarded, but given precedence. Though I agree with them about the Jewishness of Jesus, I also agree with Schweitzer about this latest work as that of the Jesus Seminar and others, that their view of the historical Jesus says as much about the scholars as it does about Jesus.

I will stop with the tour of scholarship now to say that what these scholars largely agree on is that Jesus was a real person and they further say: Jesus was a Jew from Nazareth in Galilee; Jesus was baptized by John and their two ministries were related in some way; Jesus was known as a miracle worker; Jesus preached about reversing the world order; Jesus was put to death around 30 a.d. for insurrection; and Jesus followers claimed he rose from the dead and this resurrection had a profound effect on those followers. There are other historical points of agreement as well.

All of this comes as a surprise to those who dismiss Jesus as merely myth or legend. You have certainly run across the offspring of this mythological thinking which includes The DaVinci Code. Yet despite attempts to tear apart faith with research, scholarship has found more proof even as they disagree on the importance and meaning of the data. That Jesus was a real historical person whose movement continues to this day is established fact. We know that Jesus lived, taught, and changed lives.

That Jesus’ very life and ministry are attested to by the historic record is helpful. But beyond the scholarship, we are interested in the Jesus of faith as well as the Jesus of history. Jesus is encountered meaningfully today in scripture, in our lives, and in the acts of prayer and worship. As we gather, we know that who Jesus was might be interesting to consider. But who Jesus is matters much more. For if Jesus was a great teacher, then we can only learn from his teachings. If Jesus was and is the Son of God, then we can also come to know him through worship.

So we are thankful for even those scholars who sought to disprove Jesus, only to show that he is more than a legend as we cam count on the historical reality that there was a man named Jesus who taught in Israel and was put to death as a threat to Rome, only to have his movement continue. But, we also count on the theological reality that Jesus was and is the second person of the Trinity who is present today. It is this Jesus we encounter in prayer and other worship as well as through reading the Bible.

In contemporary experience with Christianity, we see still that lives are changed for the good by Jesus. For those whose lives are changed it is current experience with Jesus they cite, which matters even more than historic documents or archeological investigations.

            (The Rev. Frank Logue is pastor of King of Peace Episcopal Church in Kingsland.)