Jesus Christ

← Encyclopedia

Jesus of Nazareth was a Jewish teacher, healer, and apocalyptic preacher of first-century Roman Galilee, executed by crucifixion under the prefect Pontius Pilate around the year 30. The movement that formed around his memory became Christianity, which holds him to be the Christos — the Anointed One, the Messiah of Jewish expectation — and, in its central confession, God become human. “Jesus Christ” fuses the two: the personal name and the title that the faith reads as inseparable from it.

The historical core is firmer than most ancient lives. Few serious scholars doubt that such a man lived, was baptized by John, gathered disciples in Galilee, taught largely in parables and pronouncements about the coming reign of God, and was put to death in Jerusalem. Beyond that bedrock the evidence thins quickly. The four canonical Gospels are the principal sources, written decades after the events by people of faith, in Greek, for communities already proclaiming him risen; they preserve early tradition and shape it at once, and they disagree on sequence, saying, and emphasis. A century of critical study has worked to sift the man from the proclamation, and has reached no settled portrait — the apocalyptic prophet, the wisdom teacher, the social reformer, the Galilean ḥasid have all been argued from the same texts.

What the texts themselves announce is not a biography but a claim. The Gospels present a teacher whose authority unsettled both Roman and Temple power, who ate with the disreputable, pronounced sins forgiven, and spoke of God as Father; they end not with his death but with the report of an empty tomb and appearances to his followers. On that report the whole tradition turns. The first Christians held that the crucified man had been raised and exalted, and that in him God had acted decisively for the world’s redemption. The doctrines that followed — incarnation, atonement, Trinity — are later elaborations of that conviction, hammered out over centuries of council and controversy.

His figure did not stay within one confession. Gnostic writers cast him as a revealer descending to wake the sleeping soul; the Qur’an honors him as prophet and Messiah while denying his divinity and his death on the cross; later esoteric and Theosophical readings made him an initiate or a recurring solar type. The mainstream churches resisted these as departures, and the disagreements are not small ones. Across them all the same figure keeps being claimed — read differently by each, conceded by none to the others entirely. He left no writing. Almost everything known of him is what others made of him.

→ In the library: Mead — Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: General and Gnostic Christianity (1906) · Besant — Esoteric Christianity (1901)

→ Related: Logos · Gnosis · Gnosticism · Philo Of Alexandria · Augustine Of Hippo · Origen