The Many Faces of Jesus

If Jesus posed the same question today, he might even rephrase it: “Who are scholars saying that I am?” Once again, the answers would probably come down to this: There are many different opinions. “Jesus has been a horse that different people have ridden in a lot of different directions,” said David Tracy of the University of Chicago. Over the last century, scholars have employed a complex array of sociological, anthropological, and literary methods as they have attempted to formulate answers to the question of who Jesus really was. In the end, whom do they see behind the face of Jesus?

Some scholars continue to hold that the Jesus of history was an eschatological Jewish prophet calling for repentance. However, they stop short of calling him Son of God, Messiah, and Redeemer. Most question the Biblical account of his heavenly origin and his resurrection. To others, Jesus was just a man who through his exemplary life and teachings inspired several faiths that eventually were enveloped into Christianity. And as noted in Theology Today, still others see Jesus as “a cynic, a wandering sage, or a peasant mystic; a community organizer, a hippie poet jabbing at the establishment, or a street smart provocateur who raps his way through the seething, impoverished, socially volatile villages of backwater Palestine.”

Well-Founded Doubts?

But can we really have confidence in the Gospels’ version of Jesus? Do they portray the real Jesus? The late Frederick F. Bruce, professor of Biblical criticism and exegesis at the University of Manchester, England, stated: “It is not usually possible to demonstrate by historical arguments the truth of every detail in an ancient writing, whether inside or outside the Bible. It is sufficient to have reasonable confidence in a writer’s general trustworthiness; if that is established, there is an a priori likelihood that his details are true. . . . The New Testament is not less likely to be historically reliable because Christians receive it as ‘sacred’ literature.”

After examining doubts about Jesus as portrayed in the Gospels, James R. Edwards, professor of religion at Jamestown College, North Dakota, U.S.A., wrote: “We may affirm with confidence that the Gospels preserve a diverse and significant body of evidence of the actual truth about Jesus. . . . The most reasonable answer to the question why the Gospels present Jesus as they do is because that is essentially who Jesus was. The Gospels faithfully preserve the memory that he left on his followers, that he was divinely legitimated and empowered to be God’s Son and Servant.”a

In Search of Jesus

What about non-Biblical references to Jesus Christ? How are they assessed? The works of Tacitus, Suetonius, Josephus, Pliny the Younger, and a few other classical writers include numerous references to Jesus. Of them, The New Encyclopædia Britannica (1995) says: “These independent accounts prove that in ancient times even the opponents of Christianity never doubted the historicity of Jesus, which was disputed for the first time and on inadequate grounds at the end of the 18th, during the 19th, and at the beginning of the 20th centuries.”

Sadly, modern scholars, in their quest for the “real” or “historical” Jesus, seem to have hidden his true identity behind layers of baseless speculation, pointless doubts, and unfounded theorizing. In a sense, they are guilty of the mythmaking of which they falsely accuse the Gospel writers. Some are so eager to feed their own reputation and to link their name to a startling new theory that they fail to examine honestly the evidence about Jesus. In the process, they create a “Jesus” that amounts to a figment of scholarly imagination.

For those who want to find him, the real Jesus can be found in the Bible. Luke Johnson, professor of New Testament and Christian origins at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University, argues that most research on the historical Jesus misses the Biblical objective. He says that it may be interesting to examine the social, political, anthropological, and cultural contexts of Jesus’ life and era. Yet, he adds that discovering what scholars call the historical Jesus “is hardly the point of Scripture,” which is “more concerned with describing the character of Jesus,” his message, and his role as Redeemer.

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What Others Have Said

“I have regarded Jesus of Nazareth as one amongst the mighty teachers that the world has had. . . . I shall say to the Hindus that your lives will be incomplete unless you reverently study the teachings of Jesus.”​—Mohandas K. Gandhi, The Message of Jesus Christ.

“A character so original, so complete, so uniformly consistent, so perfect, so human and yet so high above all human greatness, can be neither a fraud nor a fiction. . . . It would take more than a Jesus to invent a Jesus.”​—Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church.

“That a few simple men should in one generation have invented so powerful and appealing a personality, so lofty an ethic and so inspiring a vision of human brotherhood, would be a miracle far more incredible than any recorded in the Gospels.”​—Will Durant, Caesar and Christ.

“It may seem incomprehensible that a globe-spanning religious movement could have been triggered by a nonexistent person dreamed up as the ancient equivalent of a marketing device, given the ranks of incontestably real people who have tried and failed to found faiths.”​—Gregg Easterbrook, Beside Still Waters.

‘As a literary historian I am perfectly convinced that whatever the Gospels are, they are not legends. They are not artistic enough to be legends. Most of the life of Jesus is unknown to us, and no people building up a legend would allow that to be so.’​—C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock.