Given that the vast majority of American's already believe that Jesus was a historical figure, the challenge for the Christian person is to define who Jesus was, rather than that he was. The fact that he existed is assumed to be true, but this raises several difficult questions. The first question, "Why should I care?" is covered in this post. We must clarify for ourselves and for those around us why we should have any interest in researching who Jesus actually was; what is it that makes him stand out from all the other historical figures that we could study? This, of course, leads to the second question. If our interest in Jesus is piqued, where should we actually turn to find out more about him? That is the topic of this post.
For now, let's set aside the third question that I presented in the first post on the subject. That question, "how can I trust what I'm reading?", is so important to this second question that I debated whether or not it should come first. Upon reflection, however, I decided that it was better to set it aside for now and simply address what the material related to Jesus life actually says. As we approach Jesus to find out more about him, I think that we will find that our assumptions about him are that he is fairly innocuous; the image that we have is of a kind, caucasian gentleman with a lamb cast around his shoulders. Surely this Jesus cannot be much of a bother; this Jesus won't demand much from us. He is safe. As such, questions of whether or not we should put our confidence in what is actually recorded about Jesus won't really arise until after we've examined the material and found that, far from being innocuous, he is actually quite dangerous; far from demanding little, his claims are actually quite demanding. If not for us, at very least for the way in which we view the world. After coming into contact with who Jesus actually is and what Jesus actually teaches, we find that–if we are to trust him–we cannot go on the same way we have been prior to this moment. Everything changes if what is said about Jesus is true. And that is the point where most of us will be awoken to our senses and we will actually ask the question, "should I trust this material?" And when we ask it, then we will answer it. Until then, we'll just consider where we should look.
The place to begin, of course, is in the four account of Jesus life that are often referred to as "The Gospels". These four accounts, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, each take a particular perspective in writing about Jesus, and each of them has a particular audience in mind. They were written by four different authors at four different time periods. Yet despite those differences, we find an amazing cohesiveness between the four books. If we begin with these accounts, there are at least two things that we will begin to see; to data points, if we can call them that, as we discover who Jesus actually is.
First, we'll discover what the very early followers of Jesus though about him. Two of the writers are Jesus disciples (Matthew & John), one of them is a close follower of Jesus who would later spend time with Peter (Mark), and the other is a historian who spent extensive time researching Jesus life and traveling with the Apostle Paul. Certainly, their perspective on who Jesus actually was ought to be important to us. They were the ones who saw him, walked with him, heard him, and ultimately believed in him. These four biographies of Jesus life give us all that we need to make a clear determination of what the early church thought about Jesus: namely, that he was Savior and Lord.
Second, we'll discover what Jesus thought about himself. Jesus was not shy about making radical claims about his identity, and his biographers do not soften these claims. This in itself is worth noting. If the early followers of Jesus knew that he made claims about himself that they did not believe were true, they would have taken great claims to scrub them from the record, as it were. Yet they didn't do that. This indicates that, not only did they believe Jesus, but it also gives us confidence that Jesus believed these claims about himself as well. The most outrageous claim, and the one that finally got him sent to his death (at least from the religious leaders perspective), was that he was God, the creator of the universe. Again, this is an outrageous claim that, were you or I to make it, would make us look like absolute fools. Indeed, Jesus would have looked like a fool too, had he not proved it with his death and resurrection–or at least, that's clearly what his early followers believed about him.
Once we have come into contact with what the early church thought about Jesus, and what Jesus believed about himself, we turn our attention to the next question: what did Jesus believe about the rest of the universe? Or, what did he believe about God? What was his belief about how the world operates, and why it was that he needed to come and offer some sort of salvation? We'll find in short order that what Jesus believed, and the "scripture" that he used, was the Hebrew Bible, or what Christians would refer to as the Old Testament. At the beginning of his ministry, Jesus opens to the center of that Scripture and claims that he is ushering in the fulfillment of all that it promises; at the end of his ministry, Jesus takes time to show that everything that was written in the Hebrew Bible pointed towards him. At very least, what we learn from this is that Jesus viewed the Old Testament as trustworthy. They were so trustworthy, in fact, that not only did God deliver them to his people so that they would know what it was that he expected of them, but then, in a great cosmic act of mercy, fulfilled the demands himself. This is the reason why Jesus can say to his followers that the only way to get back into God's good grace, as it were, was through Him. He was the gate into the life you've always wanted, that you've always tried to create.
Finally, we come to the implications. What does this all mean? For that, we turn to what Christians refer to as the New Testament. A collection of letters and teaching that were written by the very early church leaders and distributed amongst the churches. They, too, were considered authoritative and trustworthy. In the letters we find the early church leaders instructing the people on how the fulfillment of God's law ought to impact our lives, today. One thing that stands out: the expectations of God still matter, it's just that our failure to live up to them isn't held against us. The good news of Jesus is that since he has fulfilled them, our failure to fulfill them will never be held against us again, so long as we put our confidence in his efforts rather than our own. It was unacceptable to the early leaders that you would want to have Jesus, but disagree with him about what he viewed as sin. You couldn't have it both ways. If you acknowledged that Jesus was God, Lord, and Savior, then you also had to agree that what Jesus believed about how God intended the world to be (evidenced through Jesus' scriptures and his own teachings) was actually true. You couldn't claim to follow Jesus, but reject what he taught, even if those teachings led to some discomfort in our lives.
This discovery is what causes most people to stop and question whether or not this source material can be trusted. After all, there are only two ways to make Jesus safer than he actually is. The first is to reinterpret what Jesus said so that it fits our pre-conceived agenda. This is the theological equivalent of having our cake and eating it too; we like the idea of Jesus, but we simply cannot accept what he taught about sin, sexuality, divorce, money, or anything else for that matter. I'll take the free gift of salvation, but functionally I'll reject the reason salvation was necessary in the first place. Surely, things cannot be that bad. The great danger of this softening, or "safening", of Jesus is that it's almost always an inside job. It comes from Christians who know that they cannot totally disparate the text, or the Bible as a whole quickly becomes untrustworthy. Better instead to reinterpret what Jesus said so that it is more palatable for the modern person. The trouble with this approach, however is that it requires us to assume that what was written about Jesus is supposed to be cryptic in nature and it's only we who have discovered the hidden code. Jesus wasn't quite as serious about sin as we make him out to be, see, we have finally discovered it. Of course, if we believe anything about the Bible, we know this is highly unlikely to be true, since it is God's word evealed to us, and a hidden or cryptic meaning would not be much of a revelation at all.
Finding that we cannot simply reinterpret Jesus claims so that they fit with what we wish he would have said, we move on to the second approach to making Jesus safe, and it is simply to question whether or not the text can be trusted at all. And this is the question I alluded to at the beginning of this post. This is when our sensibilities kick in: when we realize that what Jesus is actually calling us to is much more than simply believing he was a moral teacher or an all around good guy. Jesus claimed that he was God, that God required perfection, and that anything less than that resulted in death and eternal separation from God. "Death" is the equivalent of separation from ourselves; our souls are separated from our body. "Hell" is the equivalent of separation from God; our souls are separated from the life-giver. Yet Jesus also claimed that he was the solution to that separation. We could either try to fix the problem ourselves, or we could trust him to fix it on our behalf. Those are the two options that he presents. And if they are true, then it means that he is infinitely more important than perhaps we have previously assumed. But it can't be true, can it? Surely, his biographers must have gotten it wrong. Surely, these texts can't be trusted.
And that will be the next challenge that we will have to answer.