Jesus

• 1. Introduction

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  Jesus was a 1st-century Jewish preacher in the Roman province of Judaea, and he is the central figure of the world's largest religion. He left no writings of his own. Almost everything that is known about him comes from accounts written by others, in another language, after he died. Yet his life reset the calendar itself. The most widely used calendar era on Earth, the one that numbers the current year as AD, was traditionally fixed to the approximate date of his birth. Consider the gap between the man and the figure. Virtually all modern scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed historically. They agree he debated other Jews, healed, taught in parables, and gathered followers. But the sources that preserve him were never meant to satisfy a historian. They were written to glorify him. So how do four anonymous accounts, plus a handful of letters, become the foundation of belief for billions? Why do three of those accounts read almost identically while the fourth tells a stranger story? And how can a teacher from a town so small it lacked even a marketplace be remembered as the incarnation of God? These are the questions this documentary will follow.

• 2. A Name That Means Salvation

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  "Jesus of Nazareth" was less a full name than an address. A Jewish person in his time usually had only one name, sometimes followed by a phrase naming a father or a home town. His neighbours called him "the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon", or simply "the carpenter's son". The English word Jesus arrives through Latin Iesus, from the Greek Ἰησοῦς, which renders the Hebrew name Joshua, or Yehoshua. By his era the name had already been shortened to Yeshua, a contraction visible in later biblical books such as Nehemiah. The name carries a meaning that the Gospel of Matthew makes explicit. It means "God saves", literally "Yahweh saves". Matthew records the angel telling Joseph to call the child Jesus, "for he will save his people from their sins". Commentators have drawn a deliberate parallel between this Jesus and Moses' successor Joshua, who shares the name. Joshua led the Jews into the Promised Land. The second word, Christ, was never a name at all. It began as a title, "the Christ", from the Greek Christos, a calque of the Hebrew mashiakh, or messiah. The word means "anointed", from a verb meaning to rub with oil. In biblical Judaism, sacred oil anointed exceptionally holy people and objects during their religious investiture. Early Christians applied the title because they believed Jesus was the Messiah whose arrival the Hebrew Bible had prophesied. Only in later usage did Christ harden into a name, the second half of "Jesus Christ". The word Christian, meaning a follower of Christ, has been in use since the 1st century, the same century that first joined the two words together.

• 3. Four Accounts, One Life

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  Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are the foremost sources for the life and message of their subject, and no two of them tell it the same way. The authors are generally regarded as pseudonymous, attributed by tradition to four evangelists linked to Jesus or his close followers. By the theory of Marcan priority, Mark was written first, around AD 60 to 75, followed by Matthew, then Luke, then John, the latest, dated as late as AD 100. Most scholars agree that Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source. Three of these accounts can be set side by side and read together. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called the Synoptic Gospels, from Greek words meaning "together" and "view", because they share content, arrangement, and even paragraph structure. Each still presses a different portrait. In Mark, a short gospel with few extended teachings, Jesus is a tireless wonder worker, the servant of God and humanity. Matthew presents him as the "Son of David" and a "king", the fulfilment of the Old Testament. Luke shows a divine-human saviour who befriends sinners and outcasts, and it preserves the parables of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son. John stands apart. Scholars generally agree it is impossible to find any direct literary relationship between John and the Synoptics. The transfiguration and the exorcisms that fill the others do not appear in it, and it moves the cleansing of the Temple to a different point entirely. Its prologue identifies Jesus as the divine Word, the Logos, eternally present with God and active in all creation. In John, Jesus does not merely speak God's Word. He is God's Word, the Bread of Life, the Light of the World, the True Vine. These authors showed little interest in pinning down dates. As John 21:25 admits, the gospels never claimed to list every event. About one third of their text is given over to a single week in Jerusalem.

• 4. The World Of Galilee

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  In AD 6, Judea, Idumea, and Samaria became an imperial Roman province, governed by a prefect rather than a client ruler. That prefect ran the land from Caesarea Maritima, leaving Jerusalem to the High Priest of Israel. He came up to the city mainly during religious festivals, when patriotic enthusiasm could boil over into unrest. Galilee was a different jurisdiction. Together with Perea it was a Herodian client state, ruled by Herod Antipas since 4 BC. It was evidently prosperous, with poverty limited enough that it did not threaten the social order. The wider map was a patchwork of Herodian territories, the Hellenistic city-states of the Decapolis, and the cities of Tyre and Sidon to the north in the Roman province of Syria. Roman law let the mostly Jewish territories of Judea and Galilee remain legally and culturally separate. This was the era of Hellenistic Judaism, which combined Jewish religious tradition with Greek culture. Its main centres lay at Alexandria in Egypt and Antioch, and even Jerusalem saw conflict between Hellenizers and traditionalists. The Hebrew Bible was being translated into Jewish Koine Greek and into Aramaic, as knowledge of Hebrew declined. Jews based their faith on the Torah, the five books said to have been given by God to Moses. Three religious parties stood out, the Pharisees, the Essenes, and the Sadducees, though together they represented only a small fraction of the population. Most Jews looked toward a time when God would deliver them from their pagan rulers, possibly through war against the Romans. Archaeology fills in the texture of this world. Capernaum, a city important in Jesus's ministry, was poor and small, lacking even a forum or an agora.

• 5. Teacher And Wonder Worker

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  "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind," Jesus answered when asked the greatest commandment, adding a second like it, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." Often called "rabbi", he delivered his message orally and called people to repent of their sins and devote themselves wholly to God. His ethical teaching pushed against instinct. He told followers to love their enemies, to turn the other cheek, to forgive those who had sinned against them, to refrain from hatred and lust. About a third of his recorded teachings come as parables, roughly thirty of them, stories that tie the physical world to spiritual realities. Some, like the Prodigal Son, are plain. Others, like the Growing Seed, are profound and hard to interpret. When his disciples asked why he taught in parables, Jesus answered that the chosen had been granted "to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven", while most of their generation had grown "dull hearts". Healings make up a large share of his ministry in the gospel accounts. The miracles fall into two kinds, healing miracles such as cures, exorcisms, and raising the dead, and nature miracles such as turning water into wine, walking on water, and calming a storm. Jesus credited these acts to a divine source. Accused of casting out demons by Beelzebub, he answered that he did so by the "Spirit of God", arguing that Satan would not undermine his own domain. He performed them freely and never requested or accepted payment. The miracle stories also resist easy proof. Scholar John P. Meier argues that the traditions are so widely attested across sources that total fabrication by the early church is "practically speaking, impossible". Scholar Paul J. Achtemeier counters that such miracles were not unique in the ancient world and were perceived as ambiguous even by eyewitnesses, who could claim Jesus worked with either Satan or God. Many of the stories turn on faith. In the cleansing of ten lepers and the raising of Jairus's daughter, the beneficiaries are told their healing is due to their belief.

• 6. The Final Week

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  Jesus entered Jerusalem riding a young donkey, a deliberate echo of the messianic image from the Book of Zechariah. Crowds spread cloaks and palm fronds on the road and chanted lines from Psalm 118. That entry opens the section the canonical gospels devote roughly a third of their narrative to, the week often called the Passion. He expelled the money changers from the Temple, accusing them of turning it into a den of thieves. Most scholars agree it is overwhelmingly likely that Jesus did something in the temple and spoke of its destruction. Then the machinery of betrayal began to turn. Judas Iscariot, one of the twelve apostles, struck a secret bargain with the Jewish elders to hand Jesus over for thirty silver coins. The Last Supper followed, the final meal Jesus shared with his apostles, recorded in all four gospels and in Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians. He took bread, broke it, and gave it to them, saying, "This is my body, which is given for you," then passed a cup, calling it "the new covenant in my blood". The Christian sacrament of the Eucharist rests on these words. He predicted that one of those present would betray him and that Peter would deny knowing him three times before the cock crowed. In Gethsemane, Jesus prayed to be spared his coming ordeal. Judas arrived with an armed mob and kissed him to mark him out. An unnamed disciple drew a sword and cut off a man's ear. The disciples scattered into hiding, and Peter, questioned three times, denied his teacher, then heard the cock crow and wept bitterly. The trials that followed were swift and strange. Jesus was taken to the high priest Caiaphas, who had been installed by the Roman procurator Valerius Gratus. Through the questioning Jesus said almost nothing, mounting no defence, until in Mark the high priest asked if he was the Messiah and he answered, "I am". Caiaphas tore his own robe and charged him with blasphemy. The elders brought him to Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, accusing him of subverting the nation and claiming to be a king. Observing a Passover custom, Pilate offered the crowd a choice between Jesus and a murderer named Barabbas, whose name means "son of the father". The mob chose Barabbas. Pilate wrote a sign in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek reading "Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews", and sent him to be crucified.

• 7. Death And Empty Tomb

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  Simon of Cyrene, compelled by Roman soldiers, helped carry the cross to Calvary, also called Golgotha, along the route later known as the Via Dolorosa. Two convicted thieves were crucified alongside Jesus. Offered a sponge soaked in a painkilling concoction, he refused it in Matthew and Mark, while the soldiers cast lots for his clothes beneath Pilate's multilingual inscription. The accounts diverge even here. In Matthew and Mark both thieves mock him, but in Luke one rebukes him and the other is told, "today you will be with me in Paradise." The Synoptics report darkness falling and the heavy Temple curtain tearing at his death, and in Matthew an earthquake breaks open tombs. A Roman centurion, terrified, declares that Jesus was the Son of God. That same day Joseph of Arimathea, with Pilate's permission and Nicodemus's help, took the body down, wrapped it in a clean cloth, and laid it in a new rock-hewn tomb. The following day, in Matthew, the chief priests asked Pilate to secure the tomb, and seals were placed on the great stone. No gospel describes the moment of resurrection. They describe instead an empty tomb and a series of appearances, each narrative differing from the others. Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb on Sunday morning, alone or with other women, and finds the stone rolled away and one or two angels who say Jesus is risen. He reveals himself first to Mary Magdalene, then to the disciples, in Jerusalem or in Galilee depending on the account. In Luke he eats and shows his wounds to prove he is not a spirit. To Thomas he shows them to end his doubts. Forty days after the resurrection, the Acts of the Apostles says, the disciples watched as "he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight". The appearances continued after that. On the road to Damascus, the Apostle Paul was converted after seeing a blinding light and hearing a voice say, "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting." Paul would carry the teaching to non-Jewish communities across the eastern Mediterranean, his influence on Christian thinking said to exceed that of any other New Testament author.

• 8. What History Can Recover

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  Before the Enlightenment, the Gospels were generally read as accurate historical accounts. Since the 18th century, three separate scholarly quests for the historical Jesus have unfolded, each with its own criteria, and each producing portraits that often differ from one another and from the gospel image. The pendulum has swung wide. The "maximalist" approaches of the 19th century accepted the gospel accounts as reliable wherever possible. The "minimalist" approaches of the early 20th century accepted hardly anything as historical, before fading away in the 1950s as a second quest gathered pace. Today minimalists are a small minority. A handful of facts now command near-universal agreement. The theologian James D. G. Dunn says Jesus's baptism and crucifixion "rank so high on the 'almost impossible to doubt or deny' scale of historical facts" that they often serve as starting points. Scholars invoke the criterion of embarrassment for the baptism, reasoning that early Christians would not have invented a baptism implying Jesus had sins to repent. Other episodes are judged probable rather than certain. Many scholars hold that Joseph died before the ministry began, which would explain why Mark calls Jesus the "son of Mary". The birth narratives draw more doubt. E. P. Sanders and Marcus Borg call the nativity stories in Matthew and Luke the clearest cases of invention, noting that Josephus records Herod the Great's brutality without ever mentioning a massacre of little boys. Gerd Theissen and Annette Merz conclude that Jesus was born in Nazareth, and that the Bethlehem story was developed to match scripture foretelling the messiah's birthplace. The witnesses outside Christianity are thin but telling. The historians Josephus and Tacitus both attest to his existence, Tacitus naming his execution by Pilate in book 15 of the Annals. Neither neutral nor hostile sources ever doubted that Jesus existed. They sketch a teacher with a reputation as a miracle worker, who had a brother named James, and who died a violent death. After that death, many of his own family joined the movement, and his brother James became a leader of the Jerusalem Church.