You’ve likely heard of Jesus Christ and
you probably have some theories or conclusions
about who he is or was and if you do, then
you’re not alone in that.
Through the centuries, many rationalizations
have been offered about Jesus in attempts
to make him more palatable.
When Christianity emerged 2000 years ago,
so did a swarm of interpretations of this
new religious movement and the person of Jesus
which have persisted to present day.
One of the earliest was Gnosticism in which
a variety of interpretations of Jesus’ life
and teachings were promoted.
Gnostics believed that matter, including
the body, was evil and corrupt and so they
carried this interpretation to the person
of Jesus believing that he was merely a spiritual
being and only appeared to be human.
This gave way to the opposite teaching
by Arius who said that Jesus was merely human
and not divine.
By the 17th century, Hermann Samuel Reimarus
introduced the theory that Jesus was a violent
revolutionary whose aim was to overthrow the
Roman rule of the Jewish people.
By the 18th century, historians like Dupuis
claimed that Jesus never existed at all and
was only a myth or an amalgamation of myths
and earlier religious devotions.
Later on, scholars like Burton Mack and John
Dominic Crossan insisted that Jesus was an
itinerant wandering moral philosopher – in
other words, nothing more than a wise teacher.
Some have believed that the focus of Jesus’s
life was on faith healing.
This was popularized by Mary Baker Eddy and
the Christian Science movement.
What I find interesting about this is that
so many thinkers, philosophers, theologians,
and historians, could look at all the evidence
representing the life of Jesus and construct
a version of him that emphasizes one dominant
trait to the exclusion of all others.
One person says that he was a human prophet
and nothing more while another insists that
he was a divine spiritual being and nothing
more.
Others say he was a moral teacher while others
say he was a revolutionary.
One says he was a faith healer as the other
says he was an apocalyptic prophet of doom.
If each of them can find enough evidence to
insist that Jesus was this one thing to the
exclusion of all the othes, then doesn’t
that suggest that there’s quite a bit of
evidence that Jesus was many of those things
if not all of them?
I really sympathize with the desire to rationalize
Jesus because he’s a figure that so many
of us want to claim for our own but then we
come up against the qualities that don’t
fit our affiliation or ideology.
So we try to hamstring him into these narrow
visions of who he was while ignoring all the
evidence that suggests he was way more multifaceted
than that.
The only version of Jesus that shows a balanced
appreciation for the whole portrayal of who
he was and what he did is offered in Christianity
itself, surprisingly.
Christianity offers a Jesus who was a moral
and religious teacher, a physical and spiritual
healer, a revolutionary preaching a new kind
of kingdom, and a figure of mythological proportions.
This version depicts a Jesus that is consistent
with the full spectrum of evidence that was
left behind.
It is the most logical understanding of this
history changing person that really lived
in the first century – except for one thing.
He claimed to be the son of God.
Now if that violates all your presuppositions
about what is or isn’t possible, then, in
an attempt to protect those assumptions, you
have to rationalize Jesus into something that
is more narrow and comfortable.
And you’ll have to be content with the fact
that any version of comfortable Jesus will
be at odds with the deposit of evidence that was left behind.
The shocking alternative to that is a version
of Jesus that is uncomfortable and difficult
to confine to human explanations.
