Jesus Christ. Jesus of
Nazareth is called by His followers ‘
Christ’, i.e. (God's)
Messiah or anointed one. He was apparently born shortly before the death in 4 BC of
Herod the Great and was executed in or around AD 30 after condemnation by Pontius
Pilate (on dates, see
CHRONOLOGY, BIBLICAL).
The Gospel of St
Mark (
c.AD 70) reports His
Baptism by St
John the Baptist, His
Temptation in the desert, and a ministry of preaching, teaching, and healing in
Galilee and
Judaea. The narrative centres on a
Transfiguration. Jesus chose twelve disciples (
Apostles) and attracted other supporters. The religious leadership was hostile and finally handed Him over to Pilate for trial and
crucifixion. He was buried but the tomb was found empty and a ‘young man’ announced that He had been raised. Mark's narrative is generally followed by the Gospels of St
Matthew and St
Luke, with expansions, including accounts of the
Resurrection appearances and (in Luke-Acts) the
Ascension. The author of St
John's Gospel clearly had access to a different narrative tradition which gave more prominence to Jesus' activity in Judaea. He portrays Jesus as the man from heaven who is barely touched by human weakness or pain, but he is clear that Jesus was a human being, whose mother
Mary and
brethren were known, and who suffered an ignominious death on a cross outside
Jerusalem.
Little is known of Jesus' early life. His ‘presumed father’, St
Joseph, does not appear during the ministry and was perhaps dead by then. The birth narratives are partly modelled on Scripture. Matthew's
genealogy established the messianic identity of Jesus as son of
David and son of God; Luke's prelude roots God's saving intervention on behalf of both
Gentiles and Israel in biblical tradition and so reinforces the Church's identity as God's multiracial people. All four Gospels reflect the importance of John the Baptist. The ministries of Jesus and John perhaps overlapped, but there are differences between their message and activity. Both included a note of Divine judgement in their
eschatological proclamation, but in His certainty of the nearness of God's rule, Jesus stressed the positive role of what this meant for the poor, hungry, suffering, and the lost sheep of the house of Israel.
The forms of this preaching are more easily analysed than its content. Jesus' remembered words consist largely of
parables and aphorisms. Using this-worldly realities, He proclaimed the will of God with prophetic and more than prophetic authority; He spoke and acted with an immediacy grounded in His consciousness of an intimate relationship with God, whom He addressed as Father (
Abba). While debates on the interpretation of the
Sabbath laws were common, Jesus' extraordinary powers provoked controversy when He healed someone on the Sabbath. His sense of God's will and the intention of the law led Him to criticize the traditions of scribal interpretation and perhaps to sit lightly to the laws on purity. Conversely, His prohibition of
divorce was stricter than that in
Deuteronomy. The most important symbol by which He expressed His religious meaning was God's rule or kingship, often rendered in English as ‘the Kingdom of God’. It is not, however, clear how He understood the coming of God's rule or what kind of eschatological transformation He envisaged. His deeds and words expressed God's providence, love, judgement, and forgiveness and the symbol of sovereignty is qualified by that of fatherhood in Jesus' speaking of God.
The potentially political implications of the ‘Kingdom of God’ have sometimes been taken to suggest that Jesus was a political national messiah, but it is unlikely that He intended the phrase in an anti-Roman sense. A political motivation for the crucifixion can, however, accommodate the strongly attested claim that the
Sadducean high priestly leaders and their associates in Jerusalem (not the
Pharisees or the Jewish people in general) were responsible for handing Jesus over to the Roman authorities for trial and execution around the time of the
Passover. Jesus attracted crowds, and fears that that enthusiasm might lead to Roman intervention could explain His arrest. The fact that His followers were not arrested with Him suggests that the movement was not perceived as a serious political threat.
How exactly Jesus understood what the evangelists have interpreted in their different ways is uncertain, but He evidently understood Himself to be playing a decisive role in God's saving work and it became clear that this would involve suffering. His execution on a political charge and the inscription over His cross may have helped to crystallize the disciples' growing conviction that He was, or was destined to become, the Christ. But the decisive factor was what they believed had followed His death. They described it as resurrection and understood it to signify His vindication by God. See also
CHRISTOLOGY.
