freedom from Rome and establishing a new, independent kingdom of Israel. They looked back to the great glory days of King David and believed that God would be on their side in an attempt to drive out the Roman occupying power. It was a foolish dream but similar foolish dreams had come to fruition before and many Jews, either secretly or not, thought back to the old days. They resented the presence of the Romans as a heathen occupying power and thought that a great leader might emerge, a new Messiah, a ‘son of David’ (their greatest king and military leader) or saviour of the people who would be a mighty warrior and would lead the people of Israel to independence in their own country.
Jesus, then, grew up with all these folk memories, with knowledge of the history of Israel, within a society confident in its superiority as a people chosen by God but also oppressed and powerless on the periphery of a great empire. It may seem strange to start a book on understanding Christianity with so much attention to the history of the Jewish people, but Jesus was a Jew and all Jesus’ initial followers were Jews. The Hebrew Scriptures and the story of ‘salvation history’ – God working God’s purposes out throughout the history of the Jewish people, culminating in the incarnation of Jesus – are central to any real understanding of the nature of Christianity. Jesus is held to be the hinge of history, the fulcrum point on which world history turns, since Christians believe that it is in Jesus that God fully reveals God’s self to human beings, it is in Jesus that all people are opened to the love and forgiveness of God, and it is in Jesus that God becomes incarnate and comes to earth in human form.
Recounting the ‘Life of Jesus’ is far from straightforward and takes us to the heart of the difficulty in trying to give an account of ‘What is Christianity?’ today. There are four Gospels in the Christian New Testament (the word ‘gospel’ means good news). They are named Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and for more than 1,500 years Christians believed that these were the names of the authors of the different Gospels. Today, as we shall discover, this is seen to be highly problematic.
The Gospels include various accounts; there are accounts of Jesus’ birth; a few stories of events immediately following His birth; records of His ministry and death; and one description of an event when He would have been about twelve years old. However, Christians are divided as to the status to give to these narratives. Some would insist that they are literally true (even though there are differences between them) and others would see them as conveying central truths about Jesus but also making significant theological points, whilst still others maintain that there is very little that we can know for certain about Jesus’ life. There is a wide diversity of views.
Whilst there may be disagreement among Christians about the details of Jesus’ life, there is almost no doubt at all among historians that He existed. The evidence in favour of the life of Jesus of Nazareth is actually much stronger than for most historical figures. The evidence of His message is also very strong – but the details of His life are subject to more disagreement.
Christians used to see the four Gospel books as written by four separate figures but, as will become clear later (see Chapter 10), the Gospels of Matthew and Luke contain all of Mark’s Gospel and also have other material in common. Matthew, Mark and Luke are referred to as the ‘Synoptic Gospels’. The Gospel of John is rather different and is generally considered to have been written later (see here). The Synoptic Gospels were written as historical accounts of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Events are described, sayings are recorded and Jesus’ teachings are shared with the world. The authors of the Synoptic Gospels wanted to show that Jesus was the Messiah of Jewish expectation and to show how He lived among people on earth. They wanted to show that Jesus fulfilled all the prophecies in the Hebrew Scriptures. The nature of these prophecies is disputed among scholars but there is no doubt that the people of Israel expected a deliverer to be sent. The general expectation was of a great warrior who would drive out the occupying power and restore the independence of Israel as well as the Davidic kingdom. The Messiah that the Gospels portray was very different indeed from this and they show that Jesus challenged Jewish expectations. The Messiah was not to be a great warrior but God Himself who came from heaven to show human beings how to live, to deliver them from sin and to establish a new ‘kingdom of God’ in the world that was not based on military might or an independent Jewish state but was instead a kingdom of love and commitment to God founded in the hearts and minds of Jesus’ followers.
The Gospel of John is in a different category. It shows the divinity of Jesus and, in particular, that Jesus represented the coming of God as a human being into the world (God becoming incarnate). Jesus is shown as the culmination of a divine plan for the whole of creation. The Gospel of John is regarded by most scholars as much more theological and possibly, therefore, less historical. Almost all scholars agree that it was written much later than the other three Gospels, perhaps around AD 90–120 (Jesus died about AD 33). However, there are dissenting voices to this view and some, such as the late J. A. T. Robinson, argued for a much earlier dating. The general assumption is that a more theological gospel would be dated later, but this is not necessarily the case. Some of the earliest Christian documents are letters or epistles written by the apostle Paul, and these are also highly theological. However, the general academic consensus is for a later dating.
Because of disagreements about the historicity of the accounts of Jesus’ life, giving a summary of it is not at all easy. There is no single view in Christianity about Jesus’ life. All we have are the accounts in the Gospels and the stories passed down and accepted by Christians over the centuries. How historically accurate they are is almost impossible to determine. This might seem to imply that nothing can be known with any degree of confidence about Jesus, but this is not the case. In the next chapter, when Jesus’ message is outlined, this will become clear. For the moment, however, some account needs to be given of Jesus’ life and this will be done by reference to the stories in the Gospels.
In the Hebrew Scriptures, Isaiah 9:6–7 records that God will send someone who would reign on the throne of David and would be a ‘Mighty God’ and ‘Everlasting Father’. Christians see this as pointing to the life of Jesus.
Figure 1: This picture by Henry Tanner (1898) is of the Annunciation. Mary is shown sitting on a bed and the angel appears not as a human form but as a pillar of light.
The Gospels record Jesus as being born of a young girl called Mary who was engaged to a man named Joseph. Joseph was of the tribe of Benjamin and could trace his descent back to King David (something that Matthew’s Gospel spells out in detail). However, Joseph is not recorded in the Gospels as the natural father of Jesus. Luke’s Gospel records an angel telling Mary that God had chosen her to bear a son even though she had not slept with a man (this event is called the Annunciation). This was before she and Joseph had got married, while Mary was still a virgin. The father of Jesus is seen not to be a human being but God. Jesus, Christians believe, is the Son of God. (Although this phrase was also used of the great kings of Israel such as David, for Christians it means much more than this: that God became human in Jesus.) Christians tend to praise Mary because of her faithful obedience to the command of God and see her as the crucial female example of obedience and loving service to God as well as the ideal mother. It is significant that in Islam Mary is also revered as the mother of Jesus and that Mary was also a virgin. God, in Islam, is held to have conceived Jesus in Mary’s womb rather like God created Adam at the beginning of the creation story. There is much in common between Christians and Muslims in the reverence they accord to Mary, but Muslims would claim that Jesus is one of
