Jesus once asked his Apostles this question: "Who do men say that I am?"  The Apostles told him that he had been identified as Moses, Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, or even John the Baptist raised from the dead.  Then Jesus confronted them with an even more startling question: "Who do you say I am?"  The impetuous Simon Peter jumped up and said, "The deliverer, the Son of God!"  Many of those who knew Jesus only by reputation assumed that he was the reincarnation of some well known prophet.  Some of his enemies seemed to think that he was a person in league with the prince of devils.  But the Apostles, who had lived with him for more than a year, believed he was the Son of God and in some way the Messiah expected by the Jews.  That certainly didn't settle the matter; the search for Jesus' identity has continued for over 1900 years and hasn't ended yet.

The Evolution of Christianity's Jesus Concept.

Gnosticism was a 2nd century movement whose name comes from the Greek gnosis, or "secret knowledge."  The Gnostics held that Jesus was a spiritual being whose appearance as a mortal was only an illusion. Another group of early Christians known as the Adoptionists believed that God adopted Jesus at the moment of his baptism or at the time of his resurrection.  A later group known as the Modalists taught that Jesus was only a manifestation or mode of God.  Yet another later group, the Subordinationists, saw Jesus as perhaps divine, but subordinate to God.  The church fathers were no doubt a bit distressed by all this theological disorder.  It was the Jesus concepts taught by Arius that motivated the church hierarchy to call the Council of Nicea. Arius taught that Jesus was God's first born creature, an agent who made all things.  He taught that Christ was divine, less than God, but more than man.  The matter was partly settled for the orthodox Christian church at the Council of Nicea in 325 AD.  They adopted the ideas of Athanasius: "Christ begotten, not made.  He is not creature, but creator, the same essence as the Father."  The council was also forced to clarify the Trinity doctrine to show Jesus' relationship to the Father.  But it was at the Council of Constantinople in 381 that the three persons of the Trinity were declared equal, which of course made Christ equal to the Father.  The Council of Ephesus in 431 dealt with the relationship of the human and divine natures of Jesus, but didn't resolve the issue.  It was finally resolved at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD.  Regarding Jesus' two natures they stated in part, "...in two natures without being mixed, transmuted, divided or separated....the identity of each nature is preserved and concurs into one person or being."  This has ever since been the standard doctrine about the person of Christ for the Christian church.  Attempts to enforce such standard doctrines yielded some ominous repercussions.

Since the church had gained considerable political power, expressing opinions that differed from the party line could prove hazardous to your health.  Things didn't change a great deal until that upstart priest, Luther, told the Pope what he could do with his indulgences and touched off the Protestant reformation. When the church finally got out of the government business, thus losing the power to barbecue you for expressing contrary beliefs, and when science and the Rationalists began to look at the world, the church's dogmas began to lose authority. Critical scholarship began to ferret out inconsistencies and conflicts in the scriptures. Increasingly, starting at the end of the 18th century, scholars began the search for the historical Jesus. Some of them concluded that not only was it not possible to come up with a historical Jesus, but that he was only a mythological figure, a composite of people's Messianic hopes.

Critical Scholarship and the Historical Jesus.

Albert Schweitzer, in his 1906 book, "The Quest of the Historical Jesus," examined the work of some of the Jesus investigators who preceded him. The conclusion reached by many of these investigators was that the historical Jesus cannot be found in the scriptures.  Schweitzer agrees with this conclusion, but he doesn't feel that this means that we cannot find Jesus at all.  On the last page of his book he writes, "He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word: 'Follow thou me!' and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they pass through in His fellowship, and as ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience who He is." Schweitzer accepts the idea that Jesus existed, but feels that we cannot know Him just by studying the scriptures. Unlike Schweitzer, other investigators question Jesus' very existence.

In a book titled Jesus Son of Man, Rudolf Augstein goes to great lengths to totally discredit the scriptures. He sees Jesus as a mythological figure like Mithras. While he makes many excellent points about the inconsistencies and problems with the scriptures, he seems to go overboard in rejecting even the few non-scriptural references to Jesus.  In its section about Jesus, The Encyclopedia Brittanica lists three non-scriptural historical references that are represented as credible. First, Jesus' execution was mentioned in the annals of the Roman historian Tacitus about 110 A.D. The second reference comes from Josephus, the Jewish historian at the court of Nomitian. Josephus mentions the stoning of "James, the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ." Josephus also mentions the death of John The Baptist. The third historical reference to Jesus is in the Talmud, a collection of Jewish writings. In here, Jesus is identified as the "possibly illegitimate son of a man named Panther. Jesus worked magic, ridiculed the wise, seduced and stirred up the people, gathered five disciples about him, was hanged (crucified) on the eve of passover." And recently archaeologists discovered the tomb of Caiaphas, the high priest who helped engineer the death of Jesus. But accepting Jesus' historical existence does nothing to explain who he was.

Jesus has been characterized as an uneducated peasant by some groups. In an article titled "Sepphoris" in the May/June (1994) issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, Richard Batey proposes that Jesus probably had been in the city of Sepphoris often, and may have even worked there as a carpenter since Sepphoris is only about an hour's walk from Nazareth. Batey says that archaelogogists have determined that Sepphoris was a "Greco-Roman metropolis boasting upwards of 30,000 inhabitants..." and for three decades was the capitol of Galilee and Perea.  In a footnote to this article, Batey mentions that many scholars now accept that Jesus spoke Greek as well as Aramaic, and that some of the parables may have been composed originally in Greek. These ideas are in harmony with the account of Jesus' life in The Urantia Book. The evidence points to a Jesus who was multi-lingual and well educated for a man of his time, not an illiterate peasant. The ideas about Jesus seem as numerous and varied as pebbles on the beach.

A Jesus for Everyone.

To the Christian fundamentalist, Jesus is God allowing himself to be crucified to save unworthy and sinful humanity from everlasting punishment. While most Christians of mainline Protestant churches would accept that Jesus is a divine being, they would be likely to see him as a bridge to God, rather than a sacrificial lamb. To the liberal Christian, Jesus may be only a great moralist and teacher. To the Moslem, Jesus is a prophet, an equal of Mohammed but not the Son of God. To the Hindu, Jesus may be an Avatar, a Hindu deity who incarnated on earth. To the Buddhist, Jesus might be a Bodhisattva, one who in mercy forsakes the release of Nirvana to return to earth and minister to humankind. To the Jew, Jesus might be either one of a group of false messiahs who worked the crowds around the time Jesus lived, or a good Jewish teacher who got in trouble with the authorities. To the agnostic, Jesus is a possibility; to the atheist, much ado about nothing. Rev. Bill Hammond, a Unitarian minister, in his sermon "Jesus, What Manner of Man?" sees Jesus as a man who started out as a magician but who later came to be seen as the Messiah by his followers.  In a recent book, "The Historical Jesus," John Dominic Crossman portrays Jesus as a teacher of peasant equalitarianism. He asserts that the Last Supper, Jesus' resurrection and Ascension weren't real events but "dramatic visualizations." So many books! So many Jesus's!  As I read all this, I am reminded of an old saying: What Peter says about Paul tells more about Peter than it does about Paul. Likewise, perhaps what is written about Jesus tells more about the writer than about Jesus.  Why is this so?

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There are several things that make research of Jesus' life so difficult. First, except for one incident, the life of Jesus as depicted in the Bible is a blank from the time he is a few years old until he starts his public ministry at 30. There have been many speculations as to what he did during this time, but none are provable. Another problem is that unless you agree that the scriptures are infallible, you have a hard time separating what Jesus really said from the words that were put into Jesus' mouth by the writers and revisors of the scriptures. There is a group of scholars who have been trying for years to determine what Jesus really said.  They feel that Jesus said less than a third of the words attributed to him. Their work uses the techniques of critical scholarship to winnow the words of Jesus from the added chaff.  Unfortunately, the sayings of Jesus thought to be genuine form a very small part of the New Testament, hardly enough material with which to resurrect the historical Jesus. Another problem scholars have in putting together a picture of Jesus is that he did not reveal what he believed about himself except by his reactions to others. He simply called himself the Son of Man. He apparently accepted the title of Messiah rather reluctantly. It seems that he had a different notion of himself, but he couldn't overcome the preconceived Messianic expectations of his Jewish apostles. Scholars have therefore been free to put all sorts of notions into the mind of Jesus, some profound, some foolish, and all perhaps in error. So what are we to make of this Jesus if the experts can't agree?

What Did Jesus Really Say?

While we can't always be certain what he did say, there are some things we can be sure he didn't say, ideas that are not among his words in the Bible. He never taught that humankind once lived in a state of innocence in some garden paradise until the Gods felt threatened and threw them out. He never taught that we inherited the sins of someone called Adam. He never taught that he was born of a virgin. He never taught that his mother, the Apostles, or some priest could be an intercessor between us and God. He never taught that he was God. He did say, "I and the Father are one," but this can be interpreted in any number of ways. He never taught that his purpose in coming here was to die on a cross to satisfy the justice of a stern God-judge. While he didn't condemn the concept of a church, he didn't require that we should gather once a week in large ornate buildings to repeat words and sing songs written hundreds of years ago, and listen to someone give a half hour talk.  It was Paul, not Jesus, who taught the doctrine of the depravity of man. Jesus condemned the sin, not the sinner. There is much in Christian theology and practice that Jesus never taught.

Despite the distortions and additions in the New Testament, perhaps enough of the spirit of Jesus leaks through to give us an idea of the nature of this profound person. Unfortunately, Christian theology has sometimes been more of a hindrance than a help in understanding Jesus. The Urantia Book and other sources characterize traditional Christianity more as a religion about Jesus rather than the religion of Jesus.  I believe that Jesus came not to be revered, but to help us find God for ourselves by listening to his teachings and living our lives in the same spirit he lived his life.

Jesus and Women.

From reading the Bible, but especially The Urantia Book, I perceive that Jesus was light years ahead of the people of his culture in his attitude towards women. There have been numerous speculations about Jesus and women such as: he might have been gay, maybe he had a wife that he kept hidden, or maybe he had an affair with Mary Magdelene. Or perhaps he was a priest in an obscure celibate Jewish cult. All idle speculation. The Catholic Church claims that Jesus and all of his Apostles were male; so therefore, priests should be male. On the other hand, The Urantia Book says that Jesus ordained a corps of women disciples to minister to the physical and spiritual needs of other women.  After all, Jewish men could hardly do this sort of work; men and women were very restricted in their contacts with each other. This corps is mentioned in the New Testament, but only once. You aren't surprised at that, are you?

There is an incident mentioned in the Bible that sheds some light on Jesus' attitude toward women. As I understand it, a Jewish man wasn't supposed to talk to a woman in public, even his wife. Consider the incident of the woman at the well. We are told that she was there drawing water from Jacob's well in Samaria. Jesus was there without his apostles. He asked the woman for a drink of water. She mistook his friendliness for a pass at her, but Jesus quickly set her straight and led her into a spiritual discussion. Now consider the reaction of the Apostles. They came upon their Master not only talking to a woman, but a Samaritan woman at that. They must have been astounded! But then, perhaps the Apostles were frequently astounded at the things Jesus said and did.

We know that women played a significant part in the early church; perhaps this was due to the lingering influence of Jesus. But unfortunately, cultures evolve slowly. The male hierarchy eventually organized the church like their armies and governments thus excluding women. There is no doubt in my mind that if Christians had been true to the spirit of Jesus' life and teachings, women would have played a more prominent part in the later church.  And there is another group who could profit if our culture had a less distorted picture of the human Jesus.

Jesus as Hero.

It is sad that the heroes of many young people are rock stars and TV characters. It is unfortunate that the majesty of the glorified and risen Christ has obscured the heroism of the human Jesus in Christian teachings, and that much of his life has been unknown to us. If young people could only hear the story of the young Jesus, bravely sustaining his family after the untimely death of his father, wouldn't they admire such courage, and wouldn't they be willing to follow such an admirable leader? The authors of the Jesus papers of The Urantia Book tell us, "If the Christian church would only dare to espouse the Master's program, thousands of apparently indifferent youths would rush forward to enlist in such a spiritual undertaking..."(2085)  How excellent it will be when religious teachers someday use stories from The Urantia Book to inspire young people to live their lives in the spirit Jesus exemplified in his life.

Whatever we think about Jesus, most of us would agree that no individual has had a greater impact on the history of our planet than this spiritual teacher from Galilee. Through the means of the Christian church, his teachings have penetrated every corner of our planet.  Where receptive minds and hearts are found, Jesus' ethical and moral teachings leaven the home life, the laws and institutions of government, and even the conduct of business. And as the expanded and clarified story of the life and teachings of Jesus in The Urantia Book slowly penetrate the world's cultures, we can anticipate still greater advances in all human endeavors. Even after 2000 years, his words still encourage us to spiritual growth and will do so throughout the ages to come. Jesus said, "My words will never pass away." (Matthew 24:35, UB 1736)

Dick Bain, Hickory NC, USA.