This
Christmas season, apart from trying to avoid some really awful
renditions of carols that play in supermarkets (seriously, "Santa Claus
is Coming to Town" is bad enough already without you screechily
murdering it like that), I have been thinking a little bit about who
Jesus really was. Being brought up in a Christian family, you don't
tend to question this much, but I was thinking that while historically
it is pretty certain that there was a guy in the first century A.D.
whose name gets rendered in Greek as Jesus, and whose followers called
him "Christ", it's hard to know what he was really like. (As an aside,
no serious students of history actually question that Jesus existed –
quite a range of different sources attest to that – the questions are
around whether or not he did everything that was recorded by his
followers, and about his deity – or not).
He was obviously influential, as he inspired followers who were willing to go to their death rather than deny him, and he started the largest religion in the world (yes, Christianity is the largest; Islam is second – so, incidentally, over half of the world is monotheistic). Jesus is the person who separates Christianity from its parent religion, Judaism. Jesus lived in an area that to this day still does not see peace, and is, and has been for many centuries, a hotspot for religious fervour and pilgrimage. The amount of history in that area fascinates me.
Some have mentioned how Christmas is actually us celebrating a middle eastern refugee family, which puts quite a different spin on it. He was Jewish, he was middle-eastern. Whether or not his family was poor is hard to tell, but either way, their standard of living to us would have seemed very poor, although the fact that Jesus had a trade suggests he didn't do too badly for the time. I also find that you get a very different picture than the Renaissance-era paintings and stained-glass windows when you think of Jesus as a builder. He worked with his hands, and would have spent a lot of time outdoors. He associated with fishermen. These are all very blue-collar, working-class sort of people – usually fairly rough and uncouth, too. Quite different to the pious-faced, long-haired, pale white guy we are used to. I've never seen a builder who looked like that. (As an aside, I am deliberately reinterpreting the term we usually use – carpenter – because it's easy to miss its actual meaning; also, apparently the word is more closely rendered as "artisan", and may in fact have meant he was a stonemason, as this fits a bit better with the architecture of the time).
I think people tend to conceive of Jesus (and God too, which is another discussion) as a reflection of themselves – we see Jesus as a theologian, as that's how theologians have perceived him. We see Jesus as religious and "holier than thou", because that's how religious people portray him. But, through all the shrouds of history's fog, I wonder who the real person was, and what he was like. Somehow, considering that he befriending the unwanted, the poor, and the workers, and strongly offended the uptight religious types, I don't think these perceptions are anywhere near correct. Somewhere all that way back in history was an actual person. He got tired, he got hungry, he cried, he laughed, he had friends, people got upset at him. Who was the *real* Jesus?
Jesus certainly didn't seem "religious" – the only enemies he made were hypocritical religious leaders. He hung out with the screwed up, the broken, and the outcasts. "Bad", messy people loved him, respectable, "good" people were the ones who hated him. Please, Christians, remember this more!
Was Jesus God? Did Jesus do miracles? Was he who he (and his followers) said he was? These questions, while crucial to his identity, are much harder to answer, as they strike deep into the heart of one's understanding of the universe – to accept these is to accept a reality that includes the supernatural; there is no other way about it. Either Jesus was a miracle worker or he wasn't. At this point, it's easy to quote Occam's Razor and say that it takes a bigger assumption to accept the supernatural than to accept an alternative explanation (e.g. the writings we have about him are wrong, his followers were liars, etc). Also, the bigger the claim, the bigger the evidence required – and the story of Jesus certainly makes some big claims. But, to have people willing to follow you the way Jesus' disciples did (to their deaths, in all cases but one), doesn't sound like what people would do if they knew they were lying, and there are a lot of archaeological and other historical recordings that corroborate the records in the Bible. It still requires a pretty giant leap of faith to accept, but taking the on-the-face-of-it Occam's Razor version (Jesus wasn't supernatural) still leaves a lot of unanswered questions, and a lot that doesn't add up – in some ways, accepting the supernatural gives a simpler, more consistent answer.
I was thinking recently that the one place I would want to visit if I had a time machine would be to go find Jesus. The real Jesus, the actual person, to see first-hand who he was and whether or not he was able to do the things said about him in the Bible – or, conversely, to find out that actually I've been wrong all my life. Either way, it would be good to know. Either way, I think I would learn a lot. Who was this person who left such a mark on history – and why was he so important?
One thing I do know: Jesus was a significant person. Even if you don't accept his deity, we can all learn a lot from what he said. The wisdom and the care for hurting people in his recorded words and actions is undeniable. Whether or not he was God, I still want to be more like the person I read about in the Bible – care, love, wisdom, compassion, forgiveness, an ability to inspire people to better themselves without feeling condemned, a disdain for the fake and hypocritical, and a willingness towards personal sacrifice for the benefit of others. I would like to have a friend like that. I want to be more like that myself.
Think beyond just whether or not you believe in Jesus. Either way, there is a lot we can learn from that man, and I am fascinated about this enigmatic yet noteworthy individual.
He was obviously influential, as he inspired followers who were willing to go to their death rather than deny him, and he started the largest religion in the world (yes, Christianity is the largest; Islam is second – so, incidentally, over half of the world is monotheistic). Jesus is the person who separates Christianity from its parent religion, Judaism. Jesus lived in an area that to this day still does not see peace, and is, and has been for many centuries, a hotspot for religious fervour and pilgrimage. The amount of history in that area fascinates me.
Some have mentioned how Christmas is actually us celebrating a middle eastern refugee family, which puts quite a different spin on it. He was Jewish, he was middle-eastern. Whether or not his family was poor is hard to tell, but either way, their standard of living to us would have seemed very poor, although the fact that Jesus had a trade suggests he didn't do too badly for the time. I also find that you get a very different picture than the Renaissance-era paintings and stained-glass windows when you think of Jesus as a builder. He worked with his hands, and would have spent a lot of time outdoors. He associated with fishermen. These are all very blue-collar, working-class sort of people – usually fairly rough and uncouth, too. Quite different to the pious-faced, long-haired, pale white guy we are used to. I've never seen a builder who looked like that. (As an aside, I am deliberately reinterpreting the term we usually use – carpenter – because it's easy to miss its actual meaning; also, apparently the word is more closely rendered as "artisan", and may in fact have meant he was a stonemason, as this fits a bit better with the architecture of the time).
I think people tend to conceive of Jesus (and God too, which is another discussion) as a reflection of themselves – we see Jesus as a theologian, as that's how theologians have perceived him. We see Jesus as religious and "holier than thou", because that's how religious people portray him. But, through all the shrouds of history's fog, I wonder who the real person was, and what he was like. Somehow, considering that he befriending the unwanted, the poor, and the workers, and strongly offended the uptight religious types, I don't think these perceptions are anywhere near correct. Somewhere all that way back in history was an actual person. He got tired, he got hungry, he cried, he laughed, he had friends, people got upset at him. Who was the *real* Jesus?
Jesus certainly didn't seem "religious" – the only enemies he made were hypocritical religious leaders. He hung out with the screwed up, the broken, and the outcasts. "Bad", messy people loved him, respectable, "good" people were the ones who hated him. Please, Christians, remember this more!
Was Jesus God? Did Jesus do miracles? Was he who he (and his followers) said he was? These questions, while crucial to his identity, are much harder to answer, as they strike deep into the heart of one's understanding of the universe – to accept these is to accept a reality that includes the supernatural; there is no other way about it. Either Jesus was a miracle worker or he wasn't. At this point, it's easy to quote Occam's Razor and say that it takes a bigger assumption to accept the supernatural than to accept an alternative explanation (e.g. the writings we have about him are wrong, his followers were liars, etc). Also, the bigger the claim, the bigger the evidence required – and the story of Jesus certainly makes some big claims. But, to have people willing to follow you the way Jesus' disciples did (to their deaths, in all cases but one), doesn't sound like what people would do if they knew they were lying, and there are a lot of archaeological and other historical recordings that corroborate the records in the Bible. It still requires a pretty giant leap of faith to accept, but taking the on-the-face-of-it Occam's Razor version (Jesus wasn't supernatural) still leaves a lot of unanswered questions, and a lot that doesn't add up – in some ways, accepting the supernatural gives a simpler, more consistent answer.
I was thinking recently that the one place I would want to visit if I had a time machine would be to go find Jesus. The real Jesus, the actual person, to see first-hand who he was and whether or not he was able to do the things said about him in the Bible – or, conversely, to find out that actually I've been wrong all my life. Either way, it would be good to know. Either way, I think I would learn a lot. Who was this person who left such a mark on history – and why was he so important?
One thing I do know: Jesus was a significant person. Even if you don't accept his deity, we can all learn a lot from what he said. The wisdom and the care for hurting people in his recorded words and actions is undeniable. Whether or not he was God, I still want to be more like the person I read about in the Bible – care, love, wisdom, compassion, forgiveness, an ability to inspire people to better themselves without feeling condemned, a disdain for the fake and hypocritical, and a willingness towards personal sacrifice for the benefit of others. I would like to have a friend like that. I want to be more like that myself.
Think beyond just whether or not you believe in Jesus. Either way, there is a lot we can learn from that man, and I am fascinated about this enigmatic yet noteworthy individual.
