Who is Jesus, really?

A man nobody quite knows what to do with

Almost everyone has an opinion about Jesus. A good moral teacher. A revolutionary co-opted by those in power. An invented character. A childhood friend left behind in Sunday school.

What is certain, and what historians do not dispute, is that a man called Jesus lived in Galilee in the first century, that he gathered disciples, that he unsettled the religious and political authorities of his day, and that he was executed by the Romans. What follows, however, depends on what you do with his own words.

What he said about himself

This is where Jesus becomes hard to file under “a wise man among wise men”. Great spiritual teachers point to a way. Jesus says he is the way.

• He forgives sins, something his contemporaries reserved for God alone (Mark 2:5-7).
• He says he existed before Abraham, who had died eighteen centuries earlier (John 8:58).
• He accepts being worshipped, which no Jewish prophet would have tolerated.

You can think he was mistaken. You can think his disciples exaggerated after the fact. What is hard to maintain is that he was merely a good teacher of wisdom: no good teacher of wisdom talks about himself that way.

What he did

He enters the world in a way the gospels present as unique: born of a virgin (Matthew 1:20-23; Luke 1:34-35). Christians see in this the sign that he is not simply a remarkable man, but God come to share our condition.

Jesus spends most of his time with people the religion of his day kept at arm’s length: the sick, tax collectors working for the occupying power, women of poor reputation, foreigners. He touches lepers. He eats with the people everyone avoids.

And he dies. Not as a martyr taken by surprise, but as a man who had announced it and who presents his death as a gift: “The Son of Man came to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).

What Christians claim

That the tomb was empty on the third day — a body raised, not a memory kept alive — and that this news turned a group of terrified disciples into witnesses ready to die for what they had seen. That he then ascended to the Father (Acts 1:9-11) and that he will return (Revelation 1:7). This is the central claim of the Christian faith, and it can be verified or refuted like any historical claim. Paul wrote it without hedging: if Christ has not been raised, the Christian faith is empty (1 Corinthians 15:14).

Where does that leave you?

The real question is not “what do I think of Jesus?” — that is a question about us. The question he asks is more direct: “But you, who do you say that I am?” (Mark 8:29).

You do not have to answer it today. Many people begin by reading a whole gospel — Mark takes about an hour and a half — and with a simple prayer, something like: “If you are really there, make yourself known.” That is an honest prayer, and it is enough to begin with.