Who Was Jesus?
The historical man of Nazareth, and the startling claim Christianity makes about him.
Before asking whether Jesus rose from the dead or claimed to be God, it is worth being clear about who we are talking about and what exactly is being claimed. The question "Why Jesus?" is not vague admiration for a wise teacher. It is a claim about a particular man, in a particular time and place, and about something extraordinary said to be true of him.
The man of history
Whatever one concludes about the Christian claim, the basic outline of Jesus' life is not seriously in doubt among historians.
A real person, in a real time and place. Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew of the first century, born in the reign of Caesar Augustus and executed under the Roman governor Pontius Pilate around AD 30–33. He lived in Galilee and Judea, under Roman occupation, within the world of Second Temple Judaism.
Attested outside the Bible. He is not known only from Christian sources. Non-Christian writers of the first and early second centuries — the Roman historian Tacitus, the Jewish historian Josephus, and the Roman official Pliny the Younger among them — refer to Jesus, his execution under Pilate, and the movement that sprang up in his name. That a Galilean teacher was crucified and yet worshipped shortly afterward is part of the historical record, not merely an article of faith.
A teacher, healer, and figure of controversy. He gathered disciples, taught in parables, was renowned as a healer and exorcist even by opponents, and provoked the religious authorities of his day. He was crucified — a Roman punishment for sedition and the lowest, most shameful death imaginable — and his followers then proclaimed, against every expectation, that he had risen.
The claim being made
Here is where Christianity says something no historian is forced to say, but which the rest of this stage will weigh: that this man is God become human.
Not merely a prophet or teacher. Many traditions honor Jesus as a great moral teacher or a prophet. The Christian claim is far more specific and far more startling — and whether Jesus himself invited it is a question this stage will weigh directly later on. What the claim asserts is this: that in Jesus, the one God who created the world — the God of Abraham reached by the earlier steps of this path — took on a human nature and lived a human life. This is what Christians mean by the Incarnation: not that a man became divine, but that God became man without ceasing to be God.
True God and true man. The claim is not that Jesus was a god-like figure, half-divine, or God merely appearing to be human. It is that he is fully God and fully man: one person in whom the infinite Creator and a real human life meet. He grew tired, wept, ate, and died, and yet is confessed as the eternal Word through whom all things were made.
Why it would matter. If it is true, it changes everything the earlier steps established. A God reached by reason is known from a distance, through his effects. A God who becomes man has closed that distance himself: shown his face, spoken in a human voice, and entered his own creation. That is the difference between concluding that God exists and meeting him.
It belongs to the essence of the highest good to communicate itself in the highest manner to the creature, and this is brought about chiefly by His so joining created nature to Himself that one Person is made up of these three — the Word, a soul and flesh.
Why this has to be tested, not just admired
Precisely because the claim is so large, it cannot rest on sentiment. Either God really did enter history in this man, or he did not — and that is a question evidence can be brought to bear on.
That is what the rest of this stage does. It does not ask you to assume the claim; it asks whether the historical record can bear its weight:
- whether the Gospels are early, eyewitness-rooted sources we can reason from,
- whether Jesus actually claimed a divine authority,
- whether that claim was vindicated by his rising from the dead,
- and whether the risen Christ founded a visible Church to carry it on.
Where this leads. The whole case is historical, so it stands or falls on the sources. The first honest question is therefore not "did God become man?" but "can we trust the documents that report all this?" — which is where the path turns next.