Christmas is approaching and with that, even the more incredulous among us are increasingly stumbling across a certain Jesus Christ. Much has already been discussed about the historical figure of Jesus, and yet a great deal is still unclear. Because there is a problem with him and his CV. Jesus of Nazareth is one of the best documented figures in ancient history. At the same time, almost all reports about him come from his own entourage and mostly arose long after his death. But before we go any further, if you're really just looking for a resume of Jesus...here's one.
The best source for the life of Jesus is still the Bible. At the same time, no one can ask the Bible to be a neutral document. And that presents us with an interesting challenge. What can we really know about Jesus? Did it even exist and if so, how do we know? What else can be said about the life of Jesus? To answer these questions, I would first like to summarize what we can really know about the life of Jesus, then go into how we know that, and finally summarize all the clarities and ambiguities again.
When was Jesus born?
The historical uncertainty about Jesus Christ begins with his birth. What we unquestioningly present as his date of birth is definitely wrong. Jesus was certainly not born on December 25th in the year zero. First of all, there is no year zero in our calendar. December 31 of the year 1 BC follows January 1 of the year 1 AD. And December 25th is also not mentioned in the Bible or in any other source. Jesus' supposed birthday was not attributed until centuries later and was placed on the day of the winter solstice. I have already written about this in more detail in an article on the history of Christmas. In other respects, too, we can hardly be sure of anything in the story of Jesus' birth. So the place of birth Bethlehem is at least unlikely. Jesus was probably born in Nazareth, where Mary and Joseph lived. We can't really say whether that's true with the crib in the stable. And then we also have no idea who the Holy Kings were and if there were actually three of them.
The actual year of birth of the historical figure Jesus of Nazareth (in contrast to the religious-mythological figure Jesus Christ) may actually have been a few years before the birth of Christ, as stupid as that sounds. It is assumed to be sometime between 8 and 4 BC. Jesus may have been the first child of Joseph and Mary. Or at least from Maria, depending on how you look at it biologically. However, he had numerous younger siblings. Four brothers are named in the Bible, but there were also some sisters. The story that Jesus was a carpenter is also only partly true. However, his (foster) father Joseph was probably a construction worker, which suggests that Jesus also learned this trade.
We can't say much more about the first 25 to 30 years in Jesus' life. Almost nothing was written down. After all, the gospels of the Bible focus on the last few years before Jesus died. Because it is clear:He is said to have worked his miracles there and his death on the cross is ultimately the decisive moment in the emergence of Christianity. From childhood it is only handed down - albeit with a lack of credibility - that Jesus probably visited Torah scholars when he was twelve and inspired them with his knowledge of the religious scriptures. If this is true, we can therefore assume that Jesus probably attended a religious school and learned to read and possibly also write there. Otherwise his childhood is a mystery.
The creative period of Jesus
Sometime in his twenties, Jesus' path to religiosity may have really begun when he met John the Baptist. At that time he was probably an itinerant preacher from the penitential movement, someone who preached a simple lifestyle and tried to get people excited about his teachings. This seems to have worked out quite well for Jesus, since we can assume that he joined this group. In the Bible, the baptism of Jesus by John is explained quite clearly. Shortly thereafter, the time finally begins that the four gospels of the New Testament essentially report on:the time of Jesus as a preacher. He may have wandered in his native region around Nazareth and north of it toward the Sea of Galilee, trying to attract followers to his cause like John before him. His apparent success at this suggests that Jesus was a charismatic speaker. On top of that, he had an attractive message for the poor and sick in society:The kingdom of God (that is, the end of time, as far as I understand it) is imminent, salvation is coming. This message is still somewhat familiar to us from today's religious movements.
However, Jesus may only have practiced this activity as an itinerant preacher and healer for a maximum of three years. He was soon known as a rebel within the Jewish leadership in Jerusalem, and when he finally got to Jerusalem around the year 30 (or 33, we're not so sure), he was promptly arrested. We cannot say with certainty whether this was done directly by the Roman administrators around Pontius Pilate, or whether the Jewish elite in the Jerusalem Temple originally made the arrest and then handed him over. The rest of the story should be familiar anyway. Jesus was crucified, awoke from the dead, and appeared to his disciples, if that is what you believe. In any case, Christianity was born.
How do we know anything about Jesus' CV?
So we can summarize:We can't really say much about the life of Jesus Christ. The reason for this is a very simple one:the weak sources. In large parts of Jesus' life it is to some extent manageable and, on top of that, one-sided. Although Jesus of Nazareth was sometimes mentioned in Greek, Roman and Jewish sources, it was always in passing. In addition, this only happened decades after his work and was mostly limited to short retelling of the death on the cross. So what we know about Jesus comes almost exclusively from the Bible. And I think it's obvious that this is a bit problematic.
On the plus side, one has to say that Jesus already plays a central role in the oldest texts of the New Testament. While this is not surprising in itself, it helps a lot in assessing the historical figure of Jesus and in trying to cobble together a résumé for him. The oldest texts in the Bible are the letters of Paul, which contain, among other things, alleged quotations from Jesus. Paul was a contemporary of Jesus but probably never met him personally. His letters also date from a much later period, around the year 60. The reliability of these quotations is therefore questionable. However, the fact that Paul was in direct contact with the earliest Christian communities and must have met some of Jesus' disciples makes him credible to a certain extent.
However, we can learn most about the life of Jesus from the next oldest parts of the New Testament:the Gospels. In the Bible, four gospels are "canonical", i.e. officially recognized by the church:those of Mark, Luke, Matthew and John. As has been said, they mostly deal with the ministry of Jesus in the last few years of his life. The purpose of the gospels was to cement the status of Jesus as the bringer of salvation and thus to spread Christianity. But if you try to see them as a source for the actual life of Jesus, there is another problem:none of the four authors of the gospels were contemporaries of Jesus. The oldest of the gospels, that of Mark, probably dates back to around the year 70, those of Luke and Matthew sometime between 80 and 90 and that of John two decades later.
Did Jesus even exist?
The evangelists thus wrote the texts on the basis of existing popular knowledge, the stories that were told about Jesus in the early Christian communities. In addition, they still had Paul's letters and there may have been other earlier texts about Jesus' life that we no longer know today. In any case, the authors were able to enjoy a certain artistic freedom in their work. However, everything that we can say with relative certainty about Jesus - and what I have tried to summarize above - now comes from these gospels. The basic rule for evaluating these stories can therefore only be:If all four report on an event in the same or similar form, we can assume that there must be something to it. But that's about it.
We can see that the source situation is ultimately pretty thin. Nevertheless, most historians today assume that there was a historical person, Jesus. The accounts of him collected in the New Testament of the Bible may be biased. The fact that there are still so many reports and that they correspond in important parts speaks quite clearly for the fact that the person of Jesus, the Jewish itinerant preacher from Nazareth, must have existed. And finally... Without a charismatic figure like him, it would be difficult to explain how a religion like Christianity could have come about.
In this week's podcast for this blog article, I'm talking about a part of Jesus' life story:his birth. This is documented in the Bible much worse than the later part of his life. Only two of the four evangelists have written about the birth of Jesus and I can tell you this much:they do not agree on many things. If you are now even more interested in exciting tidbits from history:Sign up for the Déjà-vu history newsletter! New posts and podcast episodes await you there every two weeks directly in your mailbox.