The Life of Jesus

A Jewish man from Galilee who taught, healed, gathered followers, and was executed by Roman authority in Jerusalem, most commonly dated to around AD 30–33. That much is accepted by essentially all historians who work on the period, including those who hold no Christian belief; Roman and Jewish writers of the following century mention him.

What he was beyond that is the question the Gospels are written to press. The church has confessed since its earliest creeds that he is fully God and fully human — one person, two natures — a formulation hammered out over centuries of argument and settled in its classic form at Chalcedon in 451.

Mark 8John 1Colossians 1

Mostly the kingdom of God, mostly in parables. The Gospels record short stories about seed, debt, lost animals and family quarrels, used to describe what God’s reign is like and who it is for.

Alongside that runs a body of teaching on how to live: anger, money, honesty, prayer, forgiveness, and the treatment of the poor. The Sermon on the Mount collects much of it. He is remembered as teaching with an authority his hearers found unusual, and as reserving his sharpest words for the religiously confident.

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Historically: he was executed by the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate, by crucifixion, a penalty Rome used for sedition and for the lowest classes. The Gospels present the immediate cause as a collision with the temple authorities during Passover week and a political calculation by Pilate.

Theologically, Christians have never treated it as only a miscarriage of justice. The New Testament writers say he died for sins, in our place, willingly. Different traditions have emphasised different aspects of what that accomplished — a ransom, a victory, a substitution, an example — and the church has never made one explanation the single official one.

Mark 15Isaiah 53Romans 51 Peter 2

This needs three separate sentences, because they are three different kinds of claim.

What the New Testament says: that Jesus was buried, that the tomb was found empty by women among his followers, and that he appeared alive to individuals and to groups. Paul, writing to Corinth within a few decades of the events, cites a list of witnesses and says most of them were still living.

What historical work can establish: that Jesus was crucified, that his followers very soon afterwards were convinced they had seen him alive, and that this conviction — not a gradual legend — is what the movement started from. Historians who agree on those points still divide sharply over what explains them, and the resurrection itself is not the kind of claim historical method can settle either way.

What Christians believe: that God raised him bodily from the dead, and that this is the ground of everything else the faith says. Mt. Pleasant holds that belief. This page does not pretend it is a neutral conclusion that the evidence forces on everyone.

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Earlier and higher than is often assumed. The material Paul quotes in 1 Corinthians 15 and Philippians 2 is widely regarded by scholars as older than the letters themselves — creedal or hymn-like fragments already in circulation — and it speaks of Jesus in language reserved for God.

That said, the precise vocabulary took centuries to settle. The debates that produced the Nicene Creed in the 4th century were real debates among people who all considered themselves Christians. Saying the belief was early is not the same as saying the definitions were finished, and this page tries not to blur the two.

1 Corinthians 15Philippians 2John 1