Chronicles of Jesus: Part 1 Introduction

For thousands of years people have studied, worshiped, committed their lives, and even died for the sake of a man named Jesus. Who was this man? What was it about him that led people to leave their families, jobs, homes, and way of life behind to follow him? For centuries people have debated, denied, and searched for historical evidence to prove his existence.

The Canonical Gospels are a great resource of information on this Jewish man from Palestine, but typically when people ask for proof of Jesus’ existence they’re looking for sources outside of the Bible itself. Considering that Jesus life was spent in a largely confined and relatively unimportant part of the Roman world, there’s a surprising amount of information about him to be discovered in secular historical sources. In fact, when you piece together these non-Christian references, what appears is a reconstruction of the gospel story itself:

A man named Jesus was called the Christ (Josephus, Antiquities), he did “magic,” led Israel into new teachings, and was eventually hung on Passover for them (Babylonian Talmud) in Judea (Tacitus, Annals 15.44). Jesus claimed to be God and would return (Eliezar), which his followers believed, worshipping him as God (Pliny the Younger, Letters 10:96).

No attempt will be made here to prove the existence of Jesus; instead I’d like to take a closer look at this man’s life and see what it can teach us about ours. If Jesus really did exist, and I believe he did, what can be gained from the sources we have available to us to determine just who this man was? While much has been said regarding his divine nature, very little has been written about his humanity. This series of essays will explore the person of Jesus, as he would appear if we could see directly into his life.

Some of the things we will discover about this man will seem obvious, but they’re often forgotten, overlooked, and sometimes discarded in light of a focused attention on his divine nature. Things like . . .

His upbringing

His temptation

His miracles

His disregard of legal systems

His stories

His death

His resurrection

I am certain that as we explore the ins and outs of Jesus’ life, what we will see is that it’s these particular details about Jesus that make him very human and very much like any of us. My conviction is that we learn more about what it means to follow God from Jesus’ humanity than from his divinity.